According to whois, google.com, amazon.com, github.com, microsoft.com, netflix.com, reddit.com, baidu.com, youtube.com, twitch.tv and wikipedia.org all use MarkMonitor [1]
apple.com, twitter.com and ocado.com use CSC Corporate Domains [2]
I have no idea what such services charge, but they're all "call for pricing" and none of those companies would blink at spending $10k/year on their domains.
Not every well known brand uses such a service, though. bbc.com uses tucows, stackoverflow.com uses name.com and ycombinator.com uses gandi. facebook.com uses RegistrarSafe, a subsidiary of themselves, and almost every domain registrar is registered with themselves.
At my last job, we called MarkMonitor after NetworkSolutions' lack of admin security got our domain hijacked. I don't remeber the prices exactly, and I'm sure they've changed, but from what I recall, the per domain year prices were about 10x normal prices, like $100/year for .com, but they also had a mininum annual spend of I think $10k/year; to get the 'super lock' domain service was about $1000/year available on a small selection of TLDs. They were also pretty dismissive on the first call until they looked us up and you could hear the dollar signs spinning in their eyes. They were very easy to work with and professional after that though. This was while they were owned by Thompson-Reuters, they've since been sold to private equity.
Google.com was registered long before Google Domains was created. Lots of other more modern Google domains---even .google ones---are registered with MarkMonitor as well. Google Domains doesn't compete with MarkMonitor for large businesses with extremely valuable domains.
That to me is a downside since that means that that is not a core part of their business. Financially, it makes no difference to them if I use their service or not.
I would rather pay a little extra to a company that has domain registration as a core part of their business and actually makes a profit from me.
And domain names are cheap. Even if you pay twice as much as the cheapest service, it still will not make any difference in your bottom line.
The counter is it's also risky to use a company that only does Domain Registration since it's a very low margin business and thus the risk for them shuttering is higher -- or they'll try to make it up with various erroneous fees
I know the concern of putting all your eggs in one basket is real, but since CF's business is literally to take over your domain DNS and slap on some add-on services, adding domain registration in-house seems like a good fit.
> The counter is it's also risky to use a company that only does Domain Registration since it's a very low margin business and thus the risk for them shuttering is higher
You can avoid this issue by going with a registrar that focuses on bulk domain sales (eg. internet.bs in my case, but there are more, like eNom I think?), as they have a high-enough volume that they can easily stay afloat even when charging reasonable prices and without aggressive upsells.
It's mostly the consumer-focused "$1 for the first year" registrars like GoDaddy that you want to stay away from. Those are the really problematic ones.
> but since CF's business is literally to take over your domain DNS and slap on some add-on services, adding domain registration in-house seems like a good fit.
Sure, if you want to send all the traffic of all of your users through a man-in-the-middle US-based company with a very dubious past and a questionable business model revolving around basically centralizing the internet.
It's not a great recommendation to make. It also raises the question of why they seem intent on killing off the registrar market by offering "at cost" (which honestly isn't much lower than what aforementioned internet.bs charges anyway).
How about mixing the two? Buy your domain at the cheapest registrar you can find. Pay for 9 years. Then as soon as you can transfer to some registrar you have more long term confidence in. You might have to purchase another year there to do this.
Net result: You get the domain at your preferred registrar, but you get 90% of the savings you would have got if you had it at the cheap register.
Ah yes that's true, I always seem to group .io in with the new crowd of TLDs in the sense that it became trendy "recently"; and I only mentioned .io domains since GitBook uses one, "gitbook.io".
.io isn't just "Indian Ocean", it is British Indian Ocean Territory. The location of the Diego Garcia military base (jointly operated by US and UK). The British expelled its indigenous population (the Chagossians) to make way for the US military. The territory is claimed by Mauritius, and the International Court of Justice in 2019 ruled (in a non-binding opinion) that the UKs separation of the territory from Mauritius was unlawful.
Some random British company convinced IANA to let it run the .io domain for their own profit. Their operation of it has nothing to do with the interests of its exiled inhabitants (the Chagossians), the British territorial and military authorities, or the US military presence which constitutes the the territory's raison d'etre.
I think it likely that, one of these days, something is going to happen to the .IO ccTLD operators. Their rights to it are very dubious, and someone else (the British government, the government of Mauritius, the Chagossians) could end up wresting it from them.
What makes me uneasy about Cloudflare's registrar service is they force the use of Cloudflare's nameservers unless you have an "Enterprise" plan (paying a monthly fee for what amounts for some registry EPP calls?!) and given how they sell at cost I can't imagine the customer support in case of similar issues to this being good.
> Namecheap dumping personal info without informing their customer
Something similar happened to me – Namecheap dumped the wrong (private) information into WHOIS immediately after a redesign of their systems. It definitely was not user error.
Dealing with Namecheap's customer support to try to resolve this was possibly the worst customer support experience I've had in 20+ years in the tech industry. Lots of lies about getting back to me the next day, passing the buck, blaming everybody but themselves, extended periods of flat-out ignoring me, and eventually a complete inability to fix it.
I've been a happy user of Hover ever since, but I'm unable to recommend them – ironically because nothing has ever gone wrong with them. I used to recommend Namecheap until that nightmare happened, then I found out just how shockingly useless they are when it comes to customer support and privacy. Ever since, I only recommend services where something has gone wrong so that I know they are capable of resolving problems well. I regret ever recommending Namecheap and don't want to make the same mistake again.
I have used hover for years and quite like them. The customer support was awesome when I had an issue with getting a .com.au domain setup for a business. Australia has some extra requirements for domains that I wasn't familiar with. I also like to have my domains separate from everything else so if I move hosts/email providers it's easy.
They have their own accreditation for .COM/.NET/.ORG/.INFO/.CA (and maybe a few others) else they fallback to Tucows OpenSRS system, which is decent except in the case of needing advanced features like DNSSEC (for certain TLDs) where they seemingly have a "Half Life 3" type schedule of deploying new features
Cloudflare Registrar had some issues at one point but they had more to do with a broken system that assumed the domain was purchased elsewhere than anything else, if I remember correctly. Their support apparently handled that case very well.
I haven't used them personally, but I've read a ton of rave reviews about gandi.net. Namecheap also talks a good talk, and Cloudflare has a good reputation.
GoDaddy answers their phones with real people, but they are completely powerless to actually help you. You can escalate all the way to the office of the CEO (who doesn't answer their phones) and they won't lift a finger to help you. I had been a customer for over ten years with several domains, and they still wouldn't help me with a three-figure billing error. What kind of business fights a decade-long customer over an interest rounding error for them?
apple.com, twitter.com and ocado.com use CSC Corporate Domains [2]
I have no idea what such services charge, but they're all "call for pricing" and none of those companies would blink at spending $10k/year on their domains.
Not every well known brand uses such a service, though. bbc.com uses tucows, stackoverflow.com uses name.com and ycombinator.com uses gandi. facebook.com uses RegistrarSafe, a subsidiary of themselves, and almost every domain registrar is registered with themselves.
[1] https://markmonitor.com/ [2] https://www.cscglobal.com/global/web/csc//micro-domain-name-...