Yea regarding namecheap/spaceship (their sort of subsidiary company). I once created a tool which could find me a cool short .de domain out of curiosity and I tried using namecheap bulk's domain feature.

It said that https://aid.de was available. I was out of the moon happy (silly me) thinking that its such a good domain or something.

Then I saw aid.de available in namecheap for around 2$ ish but for some reason I took a bath and hten later it showed 10$ ish.

Okay, I then went to spaceship and it also showed me aid.de available. I then took my card and signed up

Well the transaction took place but got refunded. It said that there was an issue or something and got insta refunded

Silly me, thought that the payment had issues and decided to do payment again. This time though my refund had to wait 10 days to come back because of international laws.

Now I had only very little amount stuck btu I can see someone losing substantial money/having it stuck

I contacted their support and they told me that both namecheap/spaceship have a bug where some domains show available when they aren't.

I haven't checked but since the amount was like 1-2$ now but this whole thing really soured my relationship with namecheap/spaceship.

For context, before this, I also had a hate/love relationship with namecheap because once I bought a domain with them using crypto and also bought their vpn which was like 20 cents basically

It had auto renewal on and my domain costed 1$ but crypto payment requires 10$ minimum and the VPN charged me money from that.

Luckily I had spotted before the 2nd month and to be honest, like only 1 month 10 days or something and I urged the namecheap company to do what's right (in that moment because a lapse of judgement had been made from my side/error and I hoped that namecheap could realize it and do "right" instead given that the cost was only around 10$ fwiw)

After waiting for many days, they finally did what's right and gave me my credits back as a one off thing and I then turned off their domains.

I also used a crypto swap thing to convert b/w usdc and btc (what namecheap accepts) and I had an issue of doing two times payment after the timeperiod of btc payment (15 mins) but they also fixed that issue by adding the credits manually when I raised the issue.

Their customer support at times can be good but the platform itself is a little shady in my opinion. For the VPN thing if I remember correctly, the auto renew was written with grey and I genuinely didn't read it without my specs.

I am gonna keep my domain with namecheap that I have and if I get deals from namecheap/spaceship then use them, but for individual domains without deals, hell no.

I know that many people don't like the centralized nature of cloudflare but cloudflare is a good thing for domains :/

I personally just buy domains from wherever's there's a deal right now as some domains I have are some that I keep for only 1 year or similar.

To be honest, if I want to pick a domain-thing, I'd rather pick the one which is the cheapest or if not, then the one which only sells domains

I just looked at porkbun and they only sell domain related things and at best mail (they also have a deal with proton which can be interesting to many)

Porkbun is also cheap so I think I would recommend porkbun/cloudflare.

I haven't decided if I will transfer my domains from namecheap or not but their customer service is nice but the same can't be said for their service sometimes in my opinion.

Never buy a .online domain