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Tell HN: Namecheap gave my account to an unverified third party

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Tell HN: Namecheap gave my account to an unverified third party

#91

Post by cube00 »

ElijahLynn wrote: post #78
cube00 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pl…

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?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40481808

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 which also went viral elsewhere https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40481979

Re: Tell HN: Namecheap gave my account to an unverified third party

#92

Post by Thrashed »

n8n_and_coffee wrote: post #53

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?

Yeah the domain was/is locked. The domain wasn't transferred - the NC account that owned the domain was handed over.

I also moved from Godaddy to NC. For me it was 2013 when GoDaddy supported SOPA.

Re: Tell HN: Namecheap gave my account to an unverified third party

#93

Post by john_strinlai »

0x3f wrote: post #90
john_strinlai wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i agree that's important to hide, but also irrelevant to preventing what happened here.

Seems pretty relevant to a social engineering attack to have more correct pieces of info to give to support.

by "what happened here" i mean this specific post. in this specific post, address information was not required.

Re: Tell HN: Namecheap gave my account to an unverified third party

#94

Post by greyface- »

sigio wrote: post #28
linsomniac wrote: post #21

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).

The problem is that they then force you to use them as a DNS host as well.

It boggles the mind that this is allowed by ICANN.

Re: Tell HN: Namecheap gave my account to an unverified third party

#96

Post by nkrisc »

ryandrake wrote: post #36

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!

In many countries that’s probably illegal, even if it’s easy. Just because a crime is easy to commit doesn’t mean it isn’t a crime.

So, keep it hypothetical.

Re: Tell HN: Namecheap gave my account to an unverified third party

#97

Post by bel8 »

system2 wrote: post #58
n8n_and_coffee wrote: post #53

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?

If the price is your concern, the Cloudflare registration is only $10.

I moved my domains from GoDaddy to NameCheap some years 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.

Re: Tell HN: Namecheap gave my account to an unverified third party

#98

Post by kevindamm »

ElijahLynn wrote: post #78
cube00 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pl…

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?

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.

Re: Tell HN: Namecheap gave my account to an unverified third party

#99

Post by jasongill »

davnicwil wrote: post #88
pilingual wrote: post #19

Namecheap has been owned by a private equity firm for several months now. It would be nice to have a nonprofit registrar so jumping every few years isn't necessary.

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 equi…

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.

Re: Tell HN: Namecheap gave my account to an unverified third party

#100

Post by happytoexplain »

system2 wrote: post #70

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).

Porkbun seems to be the current "correct" choice. That may change in one year or 10 years - but that's just how business works in the 21st century.
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