Now I'm curious how the data looks for us nerds over here on the fediverse: where do you register your domains?

If at multiple places, let's interpret this as if you were registering a domain today, where would you register it?

tackily if you don't mind boosting I'd actually like a lot of data on this I'm really curious!

@gintoxicating Tucows but I'm my own reseller.

@gintoxicating gkg

@ryanc @gintoxicating ohh? do tell more, how does that work / what are the benefits? :D

@gintoxicating

gandi

@gintoxicating I've been using Namecheap but I think I want to switch: https://jawns.club/@skyfaller/115607643790886503

I just haven't had time to evaluate alternatives, I don't know what would be better or more trustworthy.

@skyfaller oh yikes. I moved off NameCheap a bunch of years ago when something they did annoyed me :shrug:

I've used porkbun the past few years and have been really happy

@gintoxicating I've never heard of half of those.
Here in Germany, we have Hetzner, and I have registered multiple domains through them.

@gintoxicating

i usually choose inwx or Netcup.
But I have some domains @ dynadot too.

I always look at https://tld-list.com/ for the best (or good) price before registering.

@nocci hadn't heard of tld-list, that's super cool! (The TLD Launch Schedule is dope!)

@gintoxicating @matildalove Hostinger. I left Dynadot years ago when they stopped offering low-end hosting services. I was on GoDaddy before that, but left way back when they were ultra-sexist.

@gintoxicating domeindirect.nl - they also run our dedicated server for websites and email.

@corbden @gintoxicating @matildalove when was this? I remember a lot of bad things about them but wasn't aware of the sexism... wouldn't surprise me though.

@jwdt @corbden @matildalove I moved just because their order/renewal flow got incredibly obnoxious with pages of upsells. Then the corporation leaned into being gross. The founder/owner is a hard conservative and proudly hunted and killed endangered animals. GoDaddy and Bob Parsons controversies

I also just found out their terms of service doesn't allow personal use lol. "Our Services are not intended for private, personal or household use" which is weird af

Also perhaps most pragmatically and universal, their pricing sucks lol

@gintoxicating Been using INWX as my only source for a while already and I‘m very happy with them.

@gintoxicating

Fucking GoDaddy….

See when I first heard that name I thought it was a pimp site

@gintoxicating i think it might skew heavily EU and German providers. I use Domaindiscount24 / Key-Systems personally

@gintoxicating porkbun or ovh depending on the price and availability

@gintoxicating porkbun

@bussphomet a vibe they certainly leaned into hard ​

@gintoxicating I have a soft spot for academic/research networks, and both my local ccTLD and its accompanying "default" registrar are still run by a university (all the way from when its entire registry was an Excel sheet) so I'm currently using that.

@gintoxicating half on ionos, half on namecheap

@gintoxicating @glauca since I found them last year. Domainbox before that because cheap and simple and I used to work for a related company (123-Reg/Heart Internet, owned by GoDaddy last time I bothered checking but thankfully I left before that).

@jwdt @glauca among many other things, any company with a page for their 88x31 buttons is probably based yeah

none of what i am about to say is a criticism or speaks poorly for the company, but my own subjective preferences have a couple of concerns for me personally:

• the pricing is fine and reasonable to support a smaller company. if I had two domains, sure. but I have almost a hundred and the added expense would be pretty significant even just spot checking a few domains

• i prefer to use registrars directly, avoiding resellers. resellers aren't a bad thing - i was one myself like 20 years ago - the bar for being a registrar is very high.

@gintoxicating WTF? I know almost none of the options, and those I do know are "Why on earth would I do business with *these* people?!"

I'm based in Germany, and have used previously:
* United Domains
* Schlundtech
* 1&1

If I were to register now, my go-to is:
* njal.la

@henryk these are the top domain registrars by domain count.

nja.la looks nice and the privacy bent is cool (they seem to be a reseller for tucows)

"Domain names are registered under the name of Njalla" unless requested otherwise is a bad default, and a significant loss of rights compared to being the registrant on record.

@gintoxicating I currently use Gandi, OVH, and Porkbun for different domains, although I’m going to transfer the domains on Gandi to Mythic Beasts and/or Porkbun (Mythic Beasts doesn’t do .xyz so I can’t transfer everything to there), because Gandi raised prices for .org a lot (and I forgot to cancel automatic renewal in time last year). OVH I need to keep for .edu.pl, there aren’t that many other options.

If I was registering a domain now I’d probably use Mythic Beasts or Porkbun, depending on the TLD.

@jana @gintoxicating me too

It was recommended to me at my local hackerspace
don't know why they're special

@gintoxicating inwx.de

@gintoxicating

Other:

• Today: I have started migrating domains to Mythic Beasts (GB) my new default
• But I have used joker.com (DE) for most of my domains for 2+ decades
• For the special case of .au domains I use Cheaper Domains (AU - of course)

@gintoxicating

https://baremetal.ca

donates to a charity of your choice when renewing at no cost to you. real humans answer the phone and email, good tech support, appear to be legit old internet folk in Victoria, BC (Canada). I've used them for at least 20 years including hosting

@yvan @gintoxicating

Joker 'lost' one of my OH's domain names when they messed up an inbound transfer. Someone else ended up owning it and sold it. Joker were absolutely useless doing anything about it. No apology, no compensation. Entirely their fault.

@geoffl that's crap! IDK, I have never had a problem with them in my 2+ decades using them... but OTOH I am migrating things to Beasts as I just like 'em generally anyway, and they're actual real people who're just down the road. @gintoxicating

@gintoxicating this should've been multiple choice I fear

@CyReVolt Hetzner's ToS are batshit and have been used at least several times to silence marginalized voices.

@gintoxicating now im curios, can you link me to some examples of Hetzner doing that?

@CyReVolt

@gintoxicating Scaleway

@gintoxicating i use INWX.

@gintoxicating Renewed them at Gandi before they were sold, after my twenty years as a customer, and enshitified. God, I was pissed. Still pissed. I'll never not be pissed. I'll move them somewhere else in 2031 when I renew them again. (after thirty years at Gandi).

@gintoxicating I just registered a domain with GoDaddy a couple weeks ago, then immediately got hard-marketed to with AI bullshit. It took about 1 minute to register my domain, and almost half an hour of texting tech support to get my refund. I owned the domain for less than 40 minutes (~10 of trying to turn off AI chatbots and auto-generated landing pages, and 30 trying to get a refund). Now they're sitting on the domain name I bought for 30 days, so I can't register it elsewhere.

@gintoxicating at @team until currently, but they have not only not reacted well after being criticised for using the fashtech slop machine, they are still doing it, see https://manitu.social/@team/116167535284605773 as proof for example, so I guess I’ll be looking for a new domain hoster.

@gintoxicating Tucows (Hover).
Fun fact, enom is also owned by Tucows.

@gintoxicating somewhat embarrassingly, I'm using AWS. my previous registrar gave me basically zero control over the DNS, and AWS was the only one i knew at the time that would give me total control over everything.

@domi @gintoxicating I get access to the full reseller API for domain management, and in theory I handle my own abuse reports.

@gintoxicating
Other: ICUK
Which is where my current ones are registered (and hosted).

@gintoxicating

I use Regery (no recommendation, but they work) because they offered the ccTLD I needed and there wasn't a lot of other competitors with full English sites.

Prices are fine, but not the best.

@gintoxicating tbh, i have like 20 domains, but know barely more than 3 on that list, while i'd be able to count probably a dozend of other registrars
we must be in compleltey differnet bubbles

@gintoxicating i've been using porkbun and it's been positive so far.

• pro: parent company owns the .gay tld and donates money to LGBTQ+ charity
• pro: cheaper than others from my limited survey
• con: partnered with proton after proton's ceo praised trump

i'd love to learn about a registrar i can unabashedly cheer for though. https://glauca.digital/ comes close but last i checked they don't support my site's tld

@justine @gintoxicating @beasts +1

@gintoxicating #ClouDNS!
https://cloudns.net

• At least I'd use them for #DNS because that works great there.
  • I used some big domain-hoster that had basically all TLDs but was more expensive.
  • #GoDaddy, #NameCheap et. al. get their #WHOIS crawled by #spammers whilst refusing to handle #AbuseReports.
  • And #ClowmFlare is a #RogueISP knowingly and willibgly hosting #Cybercrime and #Terrorism!

@LunaDragofelis @gintoxicating I used gandi.bet before #ClouDNS supported #AFNIC-maintained #ccTLD|s.

https://infosec.space/@kkarhan/116224178886676857

@jwdt they ran ads featuring a fucking stripper cop, for one

@matildalove that's interesting because I feel like they wouldn't even allow that sort of thing to be hosted on their servers.

@jwdt @matildalove Having worked very briefly in the web hosting world as a front-line CSR back in 2012-2013, I don't trust GoDaddy for a very different UX-related reason, sexist advertising notwithstanding:

Their domain registrar had, at least a the time, a known "bug" that occasionally switches the nameservers back to their own nameservers.

No, they never formally acknowledged this bug as far as I am aware.

@jwdt @matildalove Yes, it's as frustrating as you can imagine if you worked for a competing host and had to field answers from confused customers calling in demanding to know why GoDaddy suddenly stole their domain, when the facts are that their domain was with GoDaddy, their hosting was with my employer, and somehow the nameservers got reset, and here I am needing to either walk them through *someone else's interface* to fix their nameservers or tell them to harass GoDaddy about it. =_=;

@dragonarchitect @jwdt @matildalove #GoDaddy supportibg #Cyberfascism like #SOPA costed them #Wikimedia / #Wikipedia as client - among any other decent client I knew back then...

@corbden Interesting journey through different providers.

In the end, people usually stay where they get stable performance, clear policies, and support that actually helps when needed.

@Zarajohnson @corbden +1

@gintoxicating @jwdt @corbden @matildalove so basically the exact different experience as #ClouDNS, cuz they don't care if you have 1 domain or 1.000+…

Plus they don't do bs and just have a clean interface and #API!

https://infosec.space/@kkarhan/116224178886676857

@ryanc @domi @gintoxicating so like ClouDNS?

@gintoxicating @henryk yeah...

• #ClouDNS does #DomainPrivacy as explicit opt-in by comparison, subject to whether or not said Domain allows it (i.e. .eu and many other ccTLDs don't!

https://infosec.space/@kkarhan/116224178886676857

@Minionflo @gintoxicating @CyReVolt see the #hetznered tag…

Needless to say they also can't be assed to wipe their VPSes / delete virtual drives when they provision new customers, so one has to manually shred the contents!

@gintoxicating NEVER use fuckin godaddy! They steal domains

@liilliil I've known they are notorious at front running - which I'd pedantically not want to call stealing - but yeah there are a bunch of posts where they just take domains - which I would call stealing :D

Did you have a direct experience? (Not asking for proof - just curious if you have a story!)

@gintoxicating Yes, they stole domains from my clients, they stole the domain from me personally. Cynically and brazenly.

@liilliil @gintoxicating which is why I use #ClouDNS!

https://infosec.space/@kkarhan/116224178886676857

@noisytoot @gintoxicating consider #ClouDNS, as they can do almost all domains directly or indirectly...

https://infosec.space/@kkarhan/116224178886676857

@gintoxicating I use bnamed.net can't recommend them enough!

@gintoxicating
If I want to brutally bodge: Binarylane
If I want care, joy and stability: VentraIP
Needless to say, Binarylane is the defacto default.

@noodle @gintoxicating never heard of either...
https://infosec.space/@kkarhan/116224178886676857

@alice @gintoxicating How is this shite not illegal?

Like seriously, consider #ClouDNS cuz they don't fuck around with such bs…
https://infosec.space/@kkarhan/116224178886676857

@gintoxicating no gandi or cloudflare?

@az @gintoxicating #ClownFlare are only good if you want to host Cybercrime Infrastruture or hatespeech…

• Because they rarely fire custoners even if they host CSAM, like KiwiFarms has…

@kkarhan @gintoxicating I've used a dozen different registrars, and none of them have ever stolen domains from me as brazenly as this
GD is obvious criminals

@liilliil @gintoxicating I never had problems with the few I used, but I also avoided shitshows like GoDaddy, NameCheap, ClownFlare & Hetzner.

The latter one I had to deal with at work years ago, and I'd consider them criminally incompetent…

@gintoxicating Domainhoster.com

@gintoxicating I use namecheap because I knew a guy who worked there when I registered my first domain, and I prefer keeping them all in one spot. Might look for alternatives with a better UI for DNS though, Namecheap's is a bit awkward

@gintoxicating For me personally the register is just the register where I'll buy them. After that it's mainly just setting their nameservers to other providers where I'll actually manage the DNS entries. This means when picking a register I focused on the ability to change that namserver and costs being close to the TLD Managers'.

Also I don't really focus on deal prices as any domain I grab I kinda expect to hold long term.