[mttjj]

Do you want horror stories or do you want recommendations for registrars? Your title and post content are conflicting.

In either case, I don’t have any horror stories. But I can recommend Hover. To be fair, I really don’t do anything beyond the basics with my registrar. I have 3 domains. One points to a GitHub pages destination. The second simply redirects to the first. And the third is configured as my email domain on Fastmail. But in the 5+ years I’ve been using Hover for those domains, I’ve never had any issues. And renewals are always made known way in advance with many reminders.

[noselfpromote]

You're right, I'm thinking backwards, avoiding the worst helps me to find the lesser bad.

Did you had any contact with support at Hover?

[mttjj]

No, I’ve never had to contact support. But I see they have a phone number. As much as I dislike taking on the phone, I feel like having phone support is still actually a good sign. Most of the time when I send emails to companies for support it’s a 2-3 day turnaround time and they ask the same questions over and over. Sometimes I just want to talk to someone on the phone and get my problem solved quickly.