Yep. I've been with Namecheap for a similar length of time. This week they sent me an email saying I had to update my namecheap profile information or they would close my account in 24 hours.
They locked my account so I couldn't log in. To be clear, my whois information was fullly legally compliant, and I was happy to also update my namecheap profile, but when I sent them an email they didn't get back to with an response email until there was just an hour left.
Things had been going down hill slowly and lots of my peers have already moved on to porkbun, etc, but I think now things are going downhill quite fast. I did manage to save my account (and so domains) but now I will be moving to a new registrar.
> That sounds more like a phishing attempt than anything a real company should send.
And yet companies do it all the time. Which is hilarious because they also will happily tell you to beware of phishing and scams, but they do the exact same things a phisher/scammer would do
Just a few weeks ago I moved from Namecheap to Porkbun. That's not an advertisement - I simply Googled popular registrars. But it is an indictment of Namecheap. They are going the way of GoDaddy. Please move away from them immediately. They are shifting to short-term strategies (high prices, immoral data practices, etc).
Edit: Apparently they were bought by private equity just weeks before I noticed something was wrong. Not a coincidence, I'm sure. We need to legally destroy private equity takeovers. They are pure evil and nothing but a negative force, at least in the USA.
Is it time to change registrars already? I fled Gandi a while ago because of private equity fuckery. And now I need to go somewhere else. Who won't adopt enshitification-as-a-business-plan for a few years?
No wonder people are leaving tech to go be goat farmers.
> Who won't adopt enshitification-as-a-business-plan for a few years?
I don't have a crystal ball, but NearlyFreeSpeech was recommended to me in 2010 and I've been using it since 2012. I don't think it's changed at all in that time.
Their FAQ says they use Public Domain Registry to actually buy the domains. They are a wholly owned subsidiary of The Endurance International Group, who is owned by Clearlake Capital, a PE firm! So while it may shield you a bit, if you're moving from namecheap just to avoid PE then that may not be the most obvious choice.
Gandi got EXPENSIVE which is unfortunate because they often had TLDs no one else had first. I'm still with them for a single domain. Once Cloudflare supports .se, I'm outta there!
namecheap has had a mixed reputation for several years now. when i took over responsibility for a domain registered on namecheap the first thing i did was move it off there (to gandi, because that was before gandi was sold) because i heard some problematic stories about namecheap. it baffles me everytime i see namecheap recommended.
Namecheap was one of the popular alternatives to GoDaddy, recommended by techies. That's changed now, but I'm not surprised people haven't all caught up to its new reputation.
I've had the exact same issue with a small local registrar.
Had an account where I managed multiple clients. One of the clients had their "IT guy" contact the registrar for a DNS change. The registrar promptly gave the guy full access to my account, changing the password and locking me out in the process.
As soon as I regained access I moved everything off there.
I've been a long, long term customer of Namecheap as well.
Domain privacy protection is a feature that Namecheap provides for all valid domains. Its included by default at no extra cost.
The poster didn't indicate if they had this feature enabled or not for the domain. It would have prevented the college club person from even seeing their email address to initiate a password reset.
This clearly isn't an answer for NC's customer support personnel and company policies.
But I've been a happy customer for many years and I discourage others from immediately reading other comments and rushing to jump to other registrars without doing your due dilligence.
Remember that in any situation, the people most likely to leave negative comments and reviews are the people that have had genuine bad experiences or feel like they've been slighted, even if unwarranted.
I’ve reset 2FA with a known password and it was pretty onerous. Had to provide a lot of info: username, full name on account, other domains, phone number, order number, email, invoice IDs and payment proof. Asking for my legal ID would have been an improvement, but someone would need a lot more than “pretty please” on the phone.
Yes it was enabled but it's unclear to me how effective it would've been in this case.
I attempted to login after support changed the password, but prior to the club president connecting with me. So I filed a support ticket that my password stopped working, and to NameCheap's credit they locked the account shortly thereafter. I worked with support later to regain access.
I don't know for sure if the club president was able to successfully auth with the new password before NC locked the account at my request. To be completely transparent, keeping this domain on my personal account was a legacy arrangement that probably should have been handed off sooner. Student club turnover being what it is, I was just renewing it so it wouldn't get squatted. We are fully transferring ownership to them now so there's no friction.
It's fair to criticize this arrangement as messy. Regardless, NC shouldn't have simply handed over the account to an unverified phone caller.
How is domain privacy relevant here? That only hides your email from public records. What if the attacker already knows it (as they did in this case)? Email address is quite literally something you are meant to share publicly. It is not a password.
I think their point was that if WHOIS data were hidden, a password reset request that relied on providing the email address would've been impossible. But since NC's account management allows visitors to provide just a domain name to generate an unlock email, domain privacy wouldn't be a protective layer here.
I still don’t get the argument. Say I call your bank and convince them to give me full control of your account. Are you going to go “well the bank didn’t publish my account number anywhere, so they are in the clear”?
I agree, it's not an excuse to hand over an account. I think that commenter was considering practical mitigations for a broken system, not necessarily absolving NC of responsibility had my WHOIS been public.
Enshittification and PE sellouts are great for DNS providers because migrating it can be a real pain sometimes and carry a high risk if something goes wrong. It's why so many of them are chains of "Buy through Company N! We used to work for Company N-1 before they sold out!"
Given Cloudflare's reputation for shakedowns once you pass their undisclosed thresholds I wouldn't trust them with my domains.
I'm not expecting something for nothing, we all need to eat. I'm happy to stay within any limits or even have no free tier at all.
I just don't want the fear of waking up to a sales email one morning demanding I suddenly fork out more then I earn in a year off the project for an enterprise plan because I've exceeded their undisclosed thresholds.
Can you expand more on cloudflare's shakedowns? I have some domains on Cloudflare and thought they were a trustworthy service. Is there there anything particular you can point to?
It's just traffic based: sales try to get you on a paid plan, or a higher tier. For some accounts they've given ultimatums ("pay for the higher tier by x date or we have to stop providing service"). But I believe those cases were e.g. online casinos doing specific things with the platform (say, evading national blocks on gambling websites) IIRC.
You could argue in that case it was a gambling site and it will never happen to you because you're not in a high risk category.
The scary thing for me is nowhere in their initial communications did they explain the issue they just demanded $120k upfront (refusing monthly billing).
The CEO who is usually active on HN didn't show up to give their side either, there's no way they couldn't have been aware of a 1044 upvoted post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40481979
I think they're referring to the Enterprise sales where people have felt pressured to sign six- or seven- figure contracts after usage goes above a certain point. However, all the articles I've read on it are from companies using Cloudflare to do suspicious things with rotating domains through IP addresses, or doing things to try and get around service costs. It also seems like they give you months of warning and will try to convince you to sign up for Enterprise, they don't just shut things off. But their sales team seems to portray themselves as legal, support, or compliance teams sometimes so not exactly forthcoming in their approach either.
I'm a happy user of Cloudflare, but if you're using it for domain registration and hosting infrastructure, you need to see it as a single point of failure. Any account issues and you won't be able to point your domain to an alternate host while you work things out. Any service outage in CF systems will similarly lock you out of routing around the failure. It's better to have DNS off of cloudflare if they're handling your hosting services also. Or host elsewhere and only handle domains on cloudflare. Their domain pricing doesn't add any costs over the base registrar cost, so the latter is a reasonable option.
It would be worth recommending a non-US-based registrar, since the Texas government just demonstrated that they can unilaterally suspend any domain managed by any US registrar.
Two more are NearlyFreeSpeech and UnstoppableDomains.
The latter also supports crypto domains which have no chance of a takeover except by government order, although crypto domains require the client to install a browser extension or other software to resolve. The good thing about crypto domains is that there should be no renewal fee, although there will be a fee to update the record.
Seconding the NFSN recommendation, they are great if you are technically competent. They even have optional security settings that can permanently lock you out of your account if you lose your recovery credentials, in case you want to be super strict about it. They are very clear that recovery will be impossible if you use those settings. I really like this and wish more services would offer this kind of “hard” commitment.
I've been with VentraIP in Australia for a decade now.
They're not necessarily better or worse than any other provider (I'm assuming support is good and local but I've never needed it), but they're based in Melbourne - so if push comes to shove I can physically go over there and speak with them directly.
Same thing with my payment provider, after a Stripe snafu.
I heard some advice recently, I think in an article here on HN, to just use a big company registry where it's not their profit center, indeed may even be netural to loss making, to drive other business.
This makes total sense to me. I'm not saying it solves all problems but it eliminates so many of them, including a meta problem: the risk of new classes of problems being unexpectedly introduced (by say a private equity acquisition or similar).
If domains themselves are the profit center, you are likely in trouble if there's really any incentive for them to make incremental revenue in such a competitive market. Doing 'the right thing' just of course will not factor in if there's really no reputation at stake.
The only problem with this is that having such a complex function as a non-core business unit makes it ripe to get rid of, or try to find a way to make it a profit center.
Cloudflare, for example, removed the ability to change the nameservers for all domains registered with them.
Google got tired of being in the business and sold it to Squarespace.
Being a domain registrar is a total PITA and is not for the faint of heart, so it's the sort of thing that any business that takes it on as a non-core function will eventually tire of.
> Cloudflare, for example, removed the ability to change the nameservers for all domains registered with them.
Cloudflare never offered that ability. From the time they started offering domain registrations, it was always with the caveat that the nameservers would be fixed to Cloudflare's.
Correct, I guess I should have clarified that I mean they removed the ability that most registrars have, in an attempt to make domains into a revenue driver for their primary product.
The problem is that they also need to be big enough not to be rolled by aggressive behaviour such as lawsuits, pressure from politicians, etc. I mean, some of my domains are at a tiny company run by geeks, but I wouldn't really blame them for caving if someone really put the heat on them.
There's a certain threshold above which you want to use the "law firm with in-house domain registry" type. I think the threshold is pretty high though, definitely "call us for a quote" territory. But you will notice that big companies like Amazon and Google that have their own registry, don't use it for their critical domains - such as Google.com or Amazon.com.
> Namecheap has been owned by a private equity firm for several months now.
Namecheap's cavalier attitude long predate private equity, let's stop blaming the evil financiers for everything. I'm sure it's going even further downhill from here because of it, but what happened to OP happened to others before as well and is par for the course when being a namecheap customer.
CloudFlare has their plusses and minuses, but they do offer domain registration at cost, for example $10.46/year for .com (every year, not one of those deals for the first year then more expensive down the line).
Honestly I don't really see this as a bad thing for the average person. I don't register my domains with CloudFlare, but I do all my DNS through them and it's great.
Everything propagates in 10 seconds rather than 10 hours.
Cloudflare has become a middleman and gatekeeper of the web, a single point of surveillance, and an enemy of the open internet. Giving them more business would make these problems worse. No thanks.
People are (rightfully) concerned about superintelligent AI but social engineering continues to be by far the biggest attack vector for digital infrastructure. And it’s being made worse by companies continuously cutting costs in areas like support.
The call center employee making third world minimum wage doesn’t give a shit who the real owner of the domain is. They want to end the call quickly and get 5 stars from the customer on the feedback form.
I have made it a point to move off services that force SMS-based 2fa for this exact reason. Recently even changed banks because of this.
Honestly I'm wayyy more concerned with social engineering attacks than some theoretically superintelligent AI. Social engineering is, IMO, the far worse of the too
Humans are the weakest link, wouldn't be shocked if it's some underpaid off shore call centre or whatever. That's not a vulnerability though, that is social engineering, the attack vector was a human and the exploit was a form of identity theft.
Notably, they have been bought out by private equity.
> September 2025, CVC Capital Partners acquired a majority stake in Namecheap for an undisclosed amount, valuing the company at $1.5 billion.[3][4] Kirkendall stepped down as CEO on December 16, 2025
But prior to this they have had many incidents. Switched all domains to porkbun a few years ago
This kind of story makes me wonder what's the most popular/valuable domain I can take control of simply by being convincing over the phone. Sounds tempting!
I can't even log in to most web sites anymore without doing a side-trip to my E-mail inbox, "for enhanced security," but these clowns let you just take a domain by asking nicely!
Be careful, I assume there are laws on the books that normal people wouldn't know about but a large enough target could use if you tried to pull this on them (or you could find yourself on the receiving end of a civil lawsuit).
Namecheap forces users to log in to identify themselves. So far, OK.
But then when one attempts to pay for a domain, after one has already provided all of one's credit card information to Namecheap ... Namecheap up and refers its customers to something called Link, which forces Namecheap's customers to create an account and become Link's customers - providing all that confidential credit card information, all over - leaving the customer wondering why Namecheap collected it and what they are going to do with it.
Link forces you to authenticate via SMS so that they know where you are.
This all happened less than 24 hours ago and I was already getting ready to put domain service shopping on my list of things to do but I'm glad to see I'm not the only one.
I nominate Paul Vixie as a possible candidate for CTO or even CEO of a hypothetical nonprofit DNS domain service.
More info: uggcf://fnynanir-ehalba.bet/ureovr.ugzy
If you've bought anything online recently, especially if it's not obvious who's collecting the payment details or it looks like first party on the checkout page, you've probably used Stripe.
But in those cases you don't have to sign up for it, or create an account with SMS verification. That should be totally unacceptable.
Imagine going to a grocery store and when you want to buy your pack of soda and chips, they tell you: Woah there, pardner! You need an account with MyPaymentProvider before you pay for those groceries! Oh, and you'll need to set up a password and give them your mobile number...
In the absence of actual details its hard to say what was considered for making this decision. If I have to take a wild guess then being able to demonstrate the control on the webserver hosting the content could have been one way to prove ownership over the domain.
It can be called social engineering, however one can also put it in category of account recovery by verifying content control on the domain.
The part where it gets hairy is if your credit card was associated with the account, thats probably a recipe for disaster?
Webserver control is never used and must not be used to prove domain ownership. If you're pwned and have to re-point to a server stood up from backup, having registrar relying on someone being able to put up a random file on a compromised machine would be a total security disaster.
On a different note, adding a file on webserver is one of the ACME methods (HTTP-01) to get a SSL/TLS certificate so it is indeed considered as possession method in real world already
You're missing that HTTP-01 challenge grants you no ability beyond what the check has demonstrated, i.e. you have proven that you're able to serve random file from a webserver, so the grant is to allow you to serve them via TLS connection.
There are no comparable _technical_ proof-of-registration methods because all of them would require actual access to registrar control panel and be outright silly ('point the domain to a random nameserver').
So no, proper registrars never use webserver control as means to prove identity or ownership.
Hmm, I don't know the area well; why would 2FA have been relevant here? From the (unverified) story, the account was administratively handed over via support; there was no indication from any party that the account was hacked. So 2FA prompts would never be part of the picture.
This is disheartening to hear. This year I began slowly switching my domains to NameCheap from Godaddy before renewal because of the huge difference in price plus the added NameCheap free stuff Godaddy charges extra for. I guess there's a reason NameCheap is cheap :(
Was your domain in 'locked' status, preventing transfers etc?
I moved from Namecheap 2 years ago when I had auto renew on but it did not auto-renew, which their system automatically turns your domain into an advertisement hell page. Transfer system was locked and I contacted them and told them to transfer it to my other registrar or I would file an ICANN complaint. I moved it to my main registrar (Hover) which while more expensive I haven't a problem with them in the decades I've been with them. My original registrar shutdown sometime in the mid 2000s and Hover picked up my domains, so I'm all in over there now.
I have important domains on Namecheap. Should I move them to Porkbun or Cloudflare? I only buy cheap, throwaway-type domains with Cloudflare, as I find them too corporate-like to support me for my cheap $10 domain, and that's why I kept good ones with Namecheap despite their 2x pricing. I want to work with an American company with real support. (But not with godaddy of course).
For what it's worth, I have had brief one-on-one contact with Porkbun support once. Their checkout was failing when using PayPal one day, and a seemingly real person emailed in response to my ticket about an hour and a half later to let me know they'd corrected the issue.
If you ignore this thread, did you even consider it before now? I've been with Namecheap for at least 16 years but this is the first I've read of complaints and never had any complaints myself. Which should make one question this whole thing altogether.
My experience was kind of opposite, but still bad nonetheless. I lost domains I had with them simply because I lost the phone I used for 2FA. After several calls to them, they requested some info. I supplied all they wanted, but it took them more than a year to get back to me, by which time I had lost all interest in maintaining domains with them.
Luckily these were not critical domains; I had bought them in anticipation of building a business on them.
tl;dr: Namecheap configured Domain Privacy on my domain, which isn't allowed by my Registry (.in), and then suspended my domain coz the whois info was redacted.
I stopped trusting Namecheap when they shunted all Russian users due to the Ukraine war. While it wasn't against ICANN regulations (since they did facilitate transfers out), it seemed against the spirit to me for them to do that to individual people and small businesses who weren't legally sanctioned.
I kept a couple of domains on them for a while simply because their prices for some exotic TLD's were significantly lower than my previous go-to of Hover, but now Porkbun's got them beat on everything I use, anyway, so I'd transferred the last of them out over the past year or so.
superkuh | 2 hours ago
They locked my account so I couldn't log in. To be clear, my whois information was fullly legally compliant, and I was happy to also update my namecheap profile, but when I sent them an email they didn't get back to with an response email until there was just an hour left.
Things had been going down hill slowly and lots of my peers have already moved on to porkbun, etc, but I think now things are going downhill quite fast. I did manage to save my account (and so domains) but now I will be moving to a new registrar.
DANmode | 2 hours ago
Did they mention what prompted this?
Are you aware of anything?
ramgine | 2 hours ago
iAMkenough | 2 hours ago
What if their email got caught in a spam filter? What if you only check that inbox a few times a week or after business hours?
I'll be moving my personal domains after doing some research.
jddj | 2 hours ago
I think I have one domain left with them. I haven't received anything yet, but it's a good reminder to move on.
ethin | an hour ago
And yet companies do it all the time. Which is hilarious because they also will happily tell you to beware of phishing and scams, but they do the exact same things a phisher/scammer would do
happytoexplain | 2 hours ago
Edit: Apparently they were bought by private equity just weeks before I noticed something was wrong. Not a coincidence, I'm sure. We need to legally destroy private equity takeovers. They are pure evil and nothing but a negative force, at least in the USA.
rickydroll | 2 hours ago
No wonder people are leaving tech to go be goat farmers.
chrismarlow9 | 2 hours ago
js2 | 2 hours ago
I don't have a crystal ball, but NearlyFreeSpeech was recommended to me in 2010 and I've been using it since 2012. I don't think it's changed at all in that time.
https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/domains
https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/respect
acidburnNSA | an hour ago
https://faq.nearlyfreespeech.net/q/difftos
https://publicdomainregistry.com/about-us/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearlake_Capital
happytoexplain | an hour ago
NetOpWibby | 2 hours ago
em-bee | an hour ago
happytoexplain | an hour ago
addaon | 2 hours ago
Retr0id | 2 hours ago
jolan | 2 hours ago
appcustodian2 | an hour ago
The_Blade | an hour ago
dalmo3 | 2 hours ago
Had an account where I managed multiple clients. One of the clients had their "IT guy" contact the registrar for a DNS change. The registrar promptly gave the guy full access to my account, changing the password and locking me out in the process.
As soon as I regained access I moved everything off there.
sixtyj | 2 hours ago
This is unacceptable and such companies should change their policy or be out of business.
geuis | 2 hours ago
Domain privacy protection is a feature that Namecheap provides for all valid domains. Its included by default at no extra cost.
The poster didn't indicate if they had this feature enabled or not for the domain. It would have prevented the college club person from even seeing their email address to initiate a password reset.
This clearly isn't an answer for NC's customer support personnel and company policies.
But I've been a happy customer for many years and I discourage others from immediately reading other comments and rushing to jump to other registrars without doing your due dilligence.
Remember that in any situation, the people most likely to leave negative comments and reviews are the people that have had genuine bad experiences or feel like they've been slighted, even if unwarranted.
[OP] Thrashed | 2 hours ago
I was a happy customer right up until this incident. And I certainly agree that due diligence is a must for something as critical as a registrar.
geuis | 2 hours ago
eviks | 2 hours ago
blcArmadillo | 2 hours ago
system2 | an hour ago
throwaway219450 | an hour ago
[OP] Thrashed | an hour ago
I attempted to login after support changed the password, but prior to the club president connecting with me. So I filed a support ticket that my password stopped working, and to NameCheap's credit they locked the account shortly thereafter. I worked with support later to regain access.
I don't know for sure if the club president was able to successfully auth with the new password before NC locked the account at my request. To be completely transparent, keeping this domain on my personal account was a legacy arrangement that probably should have been handed off sooner. Student club turnover being what it is, I was just renewing it so it wouldn't get squatted. We are fully transferring ownership to them now so there's no friction.
It's fair to criticize this arrangement as messy. Regardless, NC shouldn't have simply handed over the account to an unverified phone caller.
paxys | 2 hours ago
vel0city | an hour ago
john_strinlai | an hour ago
0x3f | an hour ago
john_strinlai | an hour ago
[OP] Thrashed | an hour ago
paxys | 39 minutes ago
[OP] Thrashed | 31 minutes ago
tredre3 | 58 minutes ago
phendrenad2 | 2 hours ago
slig | 10 minutes ago
pilingual | 2 hours ago
It would be nice to have a nonprofit registrar so jumping every few years isn't necessary.
viccis | 2 hours ago
terribleperson | 2 hours ago
deadalus | an hour ago
cube00 | an hour ago
I'm not expecting something for nothing, we all need to eat. I'm happy to stay within any limits or even have no free tier at all.
I just don't want the fear of waking up to a sales email one morning demanding I suddenly fork out more then I earn in a year off the project for an enterprise plan because I've exceeded their undisclosed thresholds.
ElijahLynn | an hour ago
0x3f | an hour ago
cube00 | an hour ago
You could argue in that case it was a gambling site and it will never happen to you because you're not in a high risk category.
The scary thing for me is nowhere in their initial communications did they explain the issue they just demanded $120k upfront (refusing monthly billing).
The CEO who is usually active on HN didn't show up to give their side either, there's no way they couldn't have been aware of a 1044 upvoted post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40481979
kevindamm | an hour ago
I'm a happy user of Cloudflare, but if you're using it for domain registration and hosting infrastructure, you need to see it as a single point of failure. Any account issues and you won't be able to point your domain to an alternate host while you work things out. Any service outage in CF systems will similarly lock you out of routing around the failure. It's better to have DNS off of cloudflare if they're handling your hosting services also. Or host elsewhere and only handle domains on cloudflare. Their domain pricing doesn't add any costs over the base registrar cost, so the latter is a reasonable option.
kibwen | an hour ago
kilroy123 | an hour ago
joshuamcginnis | an hour ago
wrs | an hour ago
deejaaymac | an hour ago
punk_ihaq | an hour ago
OutOfHere | an hour ago
The latter also supports crypto domains which have no chance of a takeover except by government order, although crypto domains require the client to install a browser extension or other software to resolve. The good thing about crypto domains is that there should be no renewal fee, although there will be a fee to update the record.
iamnothere | an hour ago
AussieWog93 | an hour ago
They're not necessarily better or worse than any other provider (I'm assuming support is good and local but I've never needed it), but they're based in Melbourne - so if push comes to shove I can physically go over there and speak with them directly.
Same thing with my payment provider, after a Stripe snafu.
crabmusket | an hour ago
davnicwil | an hour ago
This makes total sense to me. I'm not saying it solves all problems but it eliminates so many of them, including a meta problem: the risk of new classes of problems being unexpectedly introduced (by say a private equity acquisition or similar).
If domains themselves are the profit center, you are likely in trouble if there's really any incentive for them to make incremental revenue in such a competitive market. Doing 'the right thing' just of course will not factor in if there's really no reputation at stake.
jasongill | an hour ago
Cloudflare, for example, removed the ability to change the nameservers for all domains registered with them.
Google got tired of being in the business and sold it to Squarespace.
Being a domain registrar is a total PITA and is not for the faint of heart, so it's the sort of thing that any business that takes it on as a non-core function will eventually tire of.
duskwuff | 56 minutes ago
Cloudflare never offered that ability. From the time they started offering domain registrations, it was always with the caveat that the nameservers would be fixed to Cloudflare's.
jasongill | 16 minutes ago
ccamrobertson | an hour ago
When domains are not the profit center the company might just arbitrarily turn them off as a feature.
ajb | an hour ago
There's a certain threshold above which you want to use the "law firm with in-house domain registry" type. I think the threshold is pretty high though, definitely "call us for a quote" territory. But you will notice that big companies like Amazon and Google that have their own registry, don't use it for their critical domains - such as Google.com or Amazon.com.
tredre3 | an hour ago
Namecheap's cavalier attitude long predate private equity, let's stop blaming the evil financiers for everything. I'm sure it's going even further downhill from here because of it, but what happened to OP happened to others before as well and is par for the course when being a namecheap customer.
linsomniac | 2 hours ago
sigio | 2 hours ago
himata4113 | an hour ago
system2 | an hour ago
AussieWog93 | an hour ago
Everything propagates in 10 seconds rather than 10 hours.
greyface- | an hour ago
foresto | 53 minutes ago
paxys | 2 hours ago
The call center employee making third world minimum wage doesn’t give a shit who the real owner of the domain is. They want to end the call quickly and get 5 stars from the customer on the feedback form.
I have made it a point to move off services that force SMS-based 2fa for this exact reason. Recently even changed banks because of this.
ethin | an hour ago
mook | an hour ago
Georgelemental | an hour ago
hmokiguess | 2 hours ago
assimpleaspossi | an hour ago
In the meantime, been with NameCheap for I don't recall how long with no issues whatsoever.
dessimus | an hour ago
happytoexplain | an hour ago
assimpleaspossi | 26 minutes ago
How about never heard of any issues till this unverified, anonymous thread. Shouldn't that make one suspicious of it? Does that count?
happytoexplain | 13 minutes ago
xyst | an hour ago
> September 2025, CVC Capital Partners acquired a majority stake in Namecheap for an undisclosed amount, valuing the company at $1.5 billion.[3][4] Kirkendall stepped down as CEO on December 16, 2025
But prior to this they have had many incidents. Switched all domains to porkbun a few years ago
ryandrake | an hour ago
I can't even log in to most web sites anymore without doing a side-trip to my E-mail inbox, "for enhanced security," but these clowns let you just take a domain by asking nicely!
jacobgkau | an hour ago
nkrisc | an hour ago
So, keep it hypothetical.
paxys | 37 minutes ago
richardchilders | an hour ago
But then when one attempts to pay for a domain, after one has already provided all of one's credit card information to Namecheap ... Namecheap up and refers its customers to something called Link, which forces Namecheap's customers to create an account and become Link's customers - providing all that confidential credit card information, all over - leaving the customer wondering why Namecheap collected it and what they are going to do with it.
Link forces you to authenticate via SMS so that they know where you are.
This all happened less than 24 hours ago and I was already getting ready to put domain service shopping on my list of things to do but I'm glad to see I'm not the only one.
I nominate Paul Vixie as a possible candidate for CTO or even CEO of a hypothetical nonprofit DNS domain service.
More info: uggcf://fnynanir-ehalba.bet/ureovr.ugzy
Walf | an hour ago
https://stripe.com/payments/link
If you've bought anything online recently, especially if it's not obvious who's collecting the payment details or it looks like first party on the checkout page, you've probably used Stripe.
ryandrake | an hour ago
Imagine going to a grocery store and when you want to buy your pack of soda and chips, they tell you: Woah there, pardner! You need an account with MyPaymentProvider before you pay for those groceries! Oh, and you'll need to set up a password and give them your mobile number...
assimpleaspossi | 28 minutes ago
sandeepkd | an hour ago
It can be called social engineering, however one can also put it in category of account recovery by verifying content control on the domain.
The part where it gets hairy is if your credit card was associated with the account, thats probably a recipe for disaster?
maxgashkov | an hour ago
sandeepkd | 44 minutes ago
sandeepkd | 40 minutes ago
maxgashkov | 26 minutes ago
There are no comparable _technical_ proof-of-registration methods because all of them would require actual access to registrar control panel and be outright silly ('point the domain to a random nameserver').
So no, proper registrars never use webserver control as means to prove identity or ownership.
OutOfHere | an hour ago
mook | an hour ago
john_strinlai | an hour ago
Georgelemental | an hour ago
n8n_and_coffee | an hour ago
Was your domain in 'locked' status, preventing transfers etc?
system2 | an hour ago
bel8 | an hour ago
And recently from NameCheap to Cloudflare once I heard NameCheap changed owners.
So far, so good. If Cloudflare messes up my domains, of all things, I might as well quit tech and become a farmer.
[OP] Thrashed | an hour ago
I also moved from Godaddy to NC. For me it was 2013 when GoDaddy supported SOPA.
Adachi91 | an hour ago
terminalbraid | an hour ago
system2 | an hour ago
happytoexplain | an hour ago
jacobgkau | 54 minutes ago
assimpleaspossi | 22 minutes ago
slig | 11 minutes ago
assimpleaspossi | 7 minutes ago
prmph | an hour ago
My experience was kind of opposite, but still bad nonetheless. I lost domains I had with them simply because I lost the phone I used for 2FA. After several calls to them, they requested some info. I supplied all they wanted, but it took them more than a year to get back to me, by which time I had lost all interest in maintaining domains with them.
Luckily these were not critical domains; I had bought them in anticipation of building a business on them.
I am moving my domains to CloudFlare.
captn3m0 | an hour ago
tl;dr: Namecheap configured Domain Privacy on my domain, which isn't allowed by my Registry (.in), and then suspended my domain coz the whois info was redacted.
I know a few other people that were impacted.
jacobgkau | an hour ago
I kept a couple of domains on them for a while simply because their prices for some exotic TLD's were significantly lower than my previous go-to of Hover, but now Porkbun's got them beat on everything I use, anyway, so I'd transferred the last of them out over the past year or so.
slig | 12 minutes ago
bellowsgulch | 7 minutes ago
dvdyzag | 39 minutes ago
Previous discussion from 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32638028
Something about a bounty, the original source is down.
petecooper | 26 minutes ago
bellowsgulch | 9 minutes ago