I used to have a really cheap domain from Namecheap before, and I used Cloudflare as my DNS. I’m going to buy a new domain, and Spaceship seems to be the cheapest registrar for my domain right now (I’m only buying for one year), however they seem really new. Are there any differences between Namecheap and Spaceship, and should I use one over the other?
So having used many, many registrars both personally and for businesses, I would recommend the first year on namecheap, get that cheap price, before final 60 days are up, migrate it to cloudflare; only pay $10 in this case and they extend your remaining time over on them so you don’t lose out on any cost you already paid to previous registrar. It’s a no brainer. You pay at cost for domains at Cloudflare, but no cheap introductory price.
I’ve preferred namecheap for years for their charity fundraising for the EFF and general no-nonsense takes on various Internet related political issues that have come up over the years.
It also helps that the service is also nice with a high quality UI, a generous number of DNS records (you have to watch this, I forget who but one place I used way back when only gave 5 records for free), and I’ve never had issues with their DNS servers.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I am pretty sure that Spaceship is a new endeavor by Namecheap themselves. With this as reasoning I’ve seen people advise to keep a distance from Spaceship, because it’s somewhat expected to have the same (bad) customer service.
Sorry to say I’ve never heard of spaceship, but wanted to make sure you know that Cloudflare now has a registrar service, so if you’re already using them for DNS, that might be worth a look for you.
The first year price is a “loss leader” discount. Get you in the door, then make a profit from you in future.
Namecheap have a bit of a reputation (as can be seen here with a few people warning of poor support), Spaceship seems to be a bit of a offshoot/addition they have created, partly as it doesn’t seem to be a 1-1 comparison, and partly maybe to avoid their existing reputation?
However, it’s not entirely a bad idea to separate your registrar from your DNS provider. If one goes down, you still have access to the other to make changes. I used namecheap in the past because it was cheap, and cloudflare for DNS. If you are using both for only your registrar, it probably won’t matter much at all as you are probably not changing nameservers often, if at all, once set.
I use namecheap for a ton of my domains, but I use them only as a registrar. All of my hosting is done on other providers (aws, digitalocean, linode, etc.).
This means I’ve got access to my hosts’ machines via command line, and so can setup up certbot really easily. Though going with a self-managed host also means you’ll need to have some technical proficiency to take care of things yourself. But to me, that’s part of the fun.
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