Ted from Namecheap here. Donuts, who now operates the .io TLD, is only increasing the wholesale price by ~10%. We are still obviously not happy about this since it's always our goal to ensure that domain pricing is as accessible as possible to our customers.
It would appear that Gandi has just chosen to substantially increase their markup as part of this Donuts update. Our pricing will likely only increase a small amount, if at all.
Former Namecheap customer here, thank you for the transparancy. (I only left Namecheap because of the interface, I found that Dynadot was comparable in price and features, but with a nicer GUI. NC seems like a good company otherwise, so I'm always open to the possibility of switching back.)
Sorry to hear you had trouble with our interface. We do have some pretty substantial updates planned for 2022 and would love to have you back. Feel free to shoot any feedback to ted [at] namecheap.com.
Ted, thank you so much for participating in this thread! Namecheap provides excellent service, and I've been a happy customer for years.
As someone who owns ~30 domain names split between Namecheap and GoDaddy, it would be incredibly beneficial if you overhauled the primary domain list view. As it stands right now, your domain list UI is bulky and clunky and requires several clickthroughs to show all domains or sort effectively.
The first view you see should show a glorified table / spreadsheet view of all domains on the same page by default. A reasonable pagination limit would work for extremely large accounts, but in general I think many people would want to see everything in one place if possible.
It would further be fantastic if the domains were immediately sortable on multiple dimensions (name, expiration, tag/category) and had an integrated search box.
Tags are also really important. The tag system you have in place right now is rather useless, because you can't leverage it easily from the main view. You have to navigate away to an entirely separate product area, and even then they don't provide much assistance.
I tag my domains to group them by project. (eg. vocodes.com, vo.codes, fakeyou.com, fakeyou.app, etc. are grouped together.) It'd be really great for this to feel first class and be integrated into the primary domain view as an additional set of filters.
Godaddy used to suck in this department, but they've really upped their game. Their domain list is top notch and gives Namecheap's UI a run for its money, which is a real reversal. You used to have the best in the business.
I really abhor GoDaddy since they allowed an old high school friend of mine to break into my account and steal strategywiki.org ~15 years ago. (For those interested, I've posted the story on HN before and it should be searchable.) The only reason I have any business with them at all is because of domain marketplace purchases. Grudges aside, their product has evolved over the last few years and is really good. I'd use it as a reference point.
Passing all of your helpful feedback to our Domains PM. Thank you. As I mentioned in another comment, we're developing a new dashboard experience among other things, which we're really excited about.
Does that update include the ability to dynamically update a host's IPV6 address via a request to dynamicdns.park-your-domain.com? The guide [0] mentions that
>It is only possible to dynamically update IPv4 addresses (A records) at this time. Currently, IPv6 is not supported by our Dynamic DNS.
Is there any particular thing blocking this feature from being available for IPV6?
The interface may be a little clunky, but they provide better support than any other domain or SSL vendor, which always gives them the advantage in my book.
Support is core to our business and always our main focus but so is UX. We are admittedly a bit behind in improving our dashboard but can promise you that we have already started developing a radically updated experience and will be ready in the nearish future.
I just registered a domain with them the other day, and there didn't seem to be any egregious dark patterns. Are you talking about anything in specific?
Of course they present options during the checkout process, which is slightly forward, but reasonable as a business.
However, (1) the defaults for all add-ons are do-not-buy, (2) the buttons to navigate to the next screen are clear (not swapped, minimized, etc). But that may have just been my settings / environment?
TBF to Gandhi, IIRC they tend to give favourable prices when you buy domains or deposit funds in bulk. Their opening tier of prices are indeed pricey. Their API is excellent though.
I've always found Namecheap to be price competitive and their customer service is pretty good also. API was always a bit basic (think that had a lot to do with enom implementation)
I'm sure they do indeed have special pricing for bulk customers. Although, not sure how much has changed with them since they were acquired by private equity a couple of years ago.
I do admit that our API needs some love - fortunately we have a lot of major backend updates in the works and a new API will follow at some point. Unrelated but we did roll out a new API (entirely separate from the API you're referring to) for our Auctions platform: https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/12017783/TW6wKUfy. Curious to get your feedback if you're interested in taking it for a spin!
Which means that Gandi is in fact reducing its relative margin. I'm curious about you opinion on this. In particular, how different are bulk and promotion prices ?
Thanks Ted for the update. I bought my io domain from you guys many years ago when it was $70 or so. Thanks for keeping the price low over the years and for the update.
What about the future increase of .sh? I own one for personal stuff, and it's apparently going to increase from ~40€ to ~73€ which is a bit hard to swallow for personal use.
We left namecheap bc it lived up to its name: we were harassed by defective copyright notices that were copied to namecheap. Instead of forwarding them to us, you sent us an ultimatum that you would drop our DNS. We even had our General Counsel draft you a letter, only to have it repeated. Then we understood that we should just drop the vigilante registrar
Have been 7 years with networksolutions and very happy.
I use Namecheap to host more than 10 domains and some shared hosting, and found customer support to be awesome! Just wanted to mention it. Wondering if you have a special promo plan for guys like me that depend on Namecheap for all their personal and business domains?
Thanks for the transparency and great service! I have all but one of my domains there now (register.com had a deathgrip on until I got fed up with their process and let it lapse. Now it sits available for $370, which I'm not willing to shell out)
Thanks for the great service. I used to have all my registration through Dyn (nee DynDNS.org); when they got bought out by Oracle and started moving everything over I moved to Namecheap. Been perfectly happy since.
We would love to and we are always striving to get as close to wholesale as possible but we do have operating costs — domains are essentially our core business and we have 1,000+ CS agents + a large risk/abuse team that works around the clock to focus on the customer experience. Anyone who is selling domains with no markup at all is taking a loss in some form and/or treating it as a loss leader for other products.
No plans for that. We have never even taken any investment and luckily have been growing substantially over the last few years as a bootstrapped company.
It would appear that Gandi has just chosen to substantially increase their markup as part of this Donuts update. Our pricing will likely only increase a small amount, if at all.