Ask HN: Which domain name registrar do you use? is it still a smart move to choose cloudfare considering the recent accidents? the prices are low and you have the guarantee they will not disappear in 10 years or sold to an ad agency (see Gandi). P.S. i'm interested in users with their own website for personal use |
Domain names can also be transferred to another registrar at any time[2] for the cost of a renewal. I’m not sure what your beef is with Gandi but you can transfer at any time if you’re not satisfied with their service.
My advice: rent reputable gTLDs (com, net, org, info, dev for instance), avoid ccTLDs from countries you’re not a resident of (ccTLDs are the 2 characters TLDs), use a big name registrar (I would recommend Namecheap), and keep your domain registrations separate from your hosting (you don’t want to mix up domain name disputes with anything else if it happens)
[1]: for gTLDs since it’s part of ICANN rules, which ccTLDs are not a part of, but reliable ccTLDs offer the same guarantees
[2]: unless you maxed out the renewal period (usually 10 years). A transfer triggers a renewal, so if your domain name is already registered for 10 years, you must wait a year before transferring. That’s why I always recommend to not renew for the max period and to always keep 2 years as buffer (ie. renew for 8 years at most)
do people really put their personal address there?
You have to provide real data when registering your domain name for KYC purposes (if you lie your domain could get suspended) but it won’t be exposed anywhere anymore unless you opt in to make it public.
I suspect they will soon all be gone, replaced by investment companies that retain next to zero technical people. The nutter in me suspects there may be some goal to move everyone to big centralized platforms like Cloudflare and Amazon and at some point non-business accounts may lose the ability to update root DNS glue records. I think the goal is to centralize all DNS management and visibility. No idea what the actual long term goal is.