Ask HN: Professional Alternative to Namecheap

Recently we had an outage where a domain name expired - we didn't get a warning that it expired due to various factors but it highlighted a freaking major flaw in our systems.

Now, we are fixing it internally, but our current registration provider is namecheap (is hosted on dnsimple) for this domain, which "helpfully" put up a parking page when the site expired which meant some of our client websites were being redirected to their competitors!

So question, who do you use for professional domain name registration where this sort of parking page stupidity can be avoided? A company that will call you if a domain name is going to blow up and if there is an expiration, someone that will set the refresh to 60 seconds and contact us?

You can also just turn auto-renewal on Namecheap and put some money in there. I don't check the email where the notices are sent. And I have a lot of domain names I bought on a whim but may not renew. I'll set the important ones on auto-renew, but not the minor ones.

I would suggest to add some money into the account if you are not going to monitor the emails. I have a lot of domains with Namecheap and I've always for plenty of reminder mails from them about expiry.

For me, it looks like the problem is between the keyboard and the chair and not otherwise. Fix the emails and avoid future issues. Namecheap has been one of the best domain providers period.

I have had plenty of bad experiences and predatory and opportunistic billing with plenty of others.

I have been dealing with domains since the early network solutions days (I would comfortably say that it my experience is close to 30+ years and Namecheap as a domain provider is at the top of my list!).

What were these "various factors"? You get warnings before it even expires.

A failure in the way we’re checking our Hotmeister emails. Definitely a problem internally.

We are fixing that.

The biggest issue is with expired domains they park it to a web page that advertises other people. Would like to avoid that.