[sf-lug] Good domain name registrar

[Akkana Peck]

> On Fri, May 1, 2015 at 4:09 PM, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
> > I've always felt that Joker.com and Gandi.net are among the truly
> > excellent choices.  (There are of course others.)

Steve M Bibayoff writes:
> I've been recently (last couple of years) been partial too
> namecheap.com . AFAIR, had mostly positive experiences with them.
[ ... ]
> Anyone have any negative experience with them?

I had a slightly negative experience. About a year ago I tried to
move a domain from godaddy to namecheap, and when I tried to pay
I discovered the payment section of their website didn't work with
my Firefox setup. I'm guessing it was some combination of
cross-domain scripting and cross-domain cookies (they use a
third party for credit card payments), but after enabling JS and
cookies for every domain that seemed to be involved, and after
nearly an hour in live chat with their tech support, we gave up and
I told them to cancel the transfer (I only had a few days left
before the domain expired, and I didn't have internet yet at home
so I was doing this from the public library's wifi).

I had another domain registered on namecheap and when I renewed it
a few months ago, their payment system still didn't work for me, but
they had a PayPal option and that worked. Maybe it's better to use
PayPal anyway (minimize the number of companies that have my CC info).

I had a similar experience with Gandi.net with another domain, but
that was years ago. Their payments at the time went through some
website in France, and Gandi's tech support knew nothing about it
and couldn't help when the French website claimed it had charged my
card but nothing showed up at Gandi's end. They were nice about it,
insisted my card hadn't actually been charged (which turned out to
be true, even though the French company's website said it had) and
canceled the transfer. But since that was long ago, I've been tempted
to try them again, since I know someone who works there and I haven't
yet found a registrar that (a) isn't evil and (b) can handle payments
without a lot of fiddly cross-domain third-party cookies and javascript.

        ...Akkana