Interface : just give me the records. I don't want to buy more stuff. Somehow namecheap lets me but the same extras like email, without badgering me. Godaddy is just ads ads ads and interfaces to sell stuff to people who aren't tech savvy.
Squatting: this definitely happens with godaddy, like the OP says. Never use them, it's a disgusting practice.
I use namecheap for dozens of domains. I only used godaddy once because I couldn't get the tld on namecheap.
What do you mean by that? I use Gandi and I think their UI is excellent. Their "DNS control panel" is top notch, straight to the point, can do anything you want, easily. It is intuitive, no bullshit.
I finally tried Namecheap after 10 years of 1and1 for my personal site, and various free DDNS services for my home router. Namecheap is easy, and has guides for just about everything you’d want to do. Now my routers public IP has an easy FQDN, which cost me less than $20 for 3 years and I can update with a cURL one-liner to Namecheap’s API.
I've actually always used Godaddy for searching and Namecheap for registering, simply because Godaddy's search interface is faster and more stable but Namecheap is great for not hassling you and way easier to configure. Fix the search Namecheap, and I will no longer use Godaddy again!
I've been on Namecheap for 7-8 years and while I am satisfied, I have to say that Namecheap's search interface is unusably broken.
It's been so bad for a few years that I've actually wondered if it's a sign of decline at the company... if you want very specific complaints about the UI I am happy to elaborate.
Feedback on beast mode: it's super slow with bulk keywords (100s). It makes a separate request per keyword, and gets stuck in a minute. You should be doing the splitting server-side.
It's usually quite fast. It's using web sockets so it's full duplex. You may have hit a rate limit. Rate limits (albeit generous) are in place to prevent abuse.
> I only used godaddy once because I couldn't get the tld on namecheap.
Interesting... I'd love to get a .as domain, but Namecheap don't offer that. Does GoDaddy have more TLDs or where would you suggest to look for obscure TLDs?
we haven't seen a lot of demand for .as but if there are other folks on here that want it, we could consider onboarding it! Just upvote this comment to +1 ;)
Can you do .gs as well please?! I moved almost all my remaining domains from GoDaddy to you guys a few years back, but you don't take .gs - so I'm still lumbered with GoDaddy for those!
Namecheap’s interface for domain verification is very unintuitive, you have to jump through hoops to actually get a dns record you need to add, in order for you to verify your domain.
Sadly I still have few domains with them, after disgrunted ex-employee claimed few domains via chat (knowing company details) and namecheap put our domains into 2 weeks suspension (loss of about $250,000 of revenue) until we finally get them back and it wasn't about providing some additional evidence of who's the real owner, it was more of a pushing hard thru chat to the point majority of their Eastern European-based only chat crew knew my company by name.
But I still get some weird error messages, empty red alert boxes that doesnt say anything, and general burps time to time when trying to navigate their GUI. At least GoDaddy GUI is much more intuitive but yet they try to sell more - an obvious goal of any for-profit company.
I eventually routed most of my domains to dynadot that has much more safe chat and is US based only. No Easter European have access to my names, contacts, credit card info etc - God only knows what they can do with that info knowing an average salary in countries like Ukraine is $200 per month.
Sometimes when I read these comments like "Namecheap is the best domain provider ever" I chuckle a little - every company has an outstanding record until you test them in times when rubber truly hits the road. 99% of domain users never had any issues because ownership of domain is pretty straightforward business. So these folks than never have a problem are the last one you should be listening to when you pick a domain provider.
Just my 2c.
Edit: I don't have a dog in this race, I don't work for any domain provider and my business is entirely unrelated so I have no business in badmouthing namecheap other than personally having crappy experience with them. But I am sure for every me there is 100 people who got no issues, so that's that.
It is really sad that you had such a bad experience with their support but having such an option about a whole region of a continent just because the GDP is lower... Our salaries here in Europe's Eastern part are definitely lower than in Western Europe or in the US that definitely this does not mean we would steal to have more money. Honor is not related to how much money you earn...
Are you talking about verifying a domain (say for GSuite) with a TXT record? Unfortunately, there's no way to make this one-click since the TXT records provided are unique but we appreciate the feedback and will explore how we can make this use case more straightforward.
Would you consider the ability to export a zone file? I realize you may be withholding it because it aids transferring it out, but we often wish we could do that instead of taking screenshots or manually copying each record before we make a major DNS change.
Export a zone file? Namecheap can't even export a text or CSV file of all of my domains and their expiration dates. This is a long-standing open issue that Namecheap support has dodged several times with us. I'm still a customer right now, but I'm looking for another registrar.
Dodged? Just not currently a feature in our dashboard but it's straightforward and we know there's demand for it. We have some major updates in the works. Happy to manually provide an export for you in the meantime.
Yes, I was offered a manual export of my domain list. By "dodged", I mean that the request for an export feature in the same ticket was ignored, sort of a passive-aggressive "wontfix". I would have just scraped the HTML table, but at the time it just didn't work in Firefox/Chrome, and there was a weird interaction between filtering and showing more than 25 domains on a page. This might be fixed now, but was very frustrating at the time. I felt like support ignored all of that and just offered a manual export, without understanding how much more time it takes for me to write up a ticket (and wait for response) vs implementing a proper export feature.
Also a very satisfied Namecheap customer.
I do wish I didn't have to click so many things to modify DNS records though. But just a minor issue.
GoDaddy doesn't even sound like a professional service to me. The name itself wreaks of technical incompetence. I want round-the-clock network infra experts managing my domains, not some random dude's daddy.
Interface : just give me the records. I don't want to buy more stuff. Somehow namecheap lets me but the same extras like email, without badgering me. Godaddy is just ads ads ads and interfaces to sell stuff to people who aren't tech savvy.
Squatting: this definitely happens with godaddy, like the OP says. Never use them, it's a disgusting practice.
I use namecheap for dozens of domains. I only used godaddy once because I couldn't get the tld on namecheap.