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by rrr_oh_man 56 days ago
Where would you host domains?
7 comments

CloudFlare since they sell domains at cost and have really good DNS infrastructure with some free protection features. If the TLD isn't supported by them for registration then I'd just use their nameservers.

Or Route53 if you're using AWS since that makes it easier to integrate with the rest of AWS and manage in IaC, and AWS also has robust network/DNS infrastructure.

(I would say GCP if using GCP/Google Workspace, too, but since they split domains off to Squarespace I really don't know what is happening over there anymore as far as domains go.)

So far those 3 have been more than sufficient for all of my domain needs.

Domain registration and all other services should be separate. You don't want DNS, web hosting, mail hosting, etc. ToS applied to your registrar account because it increases the risk of the account getting locked.
I'd only use Cloudflare if I want my website to be held hostage with no possibility to migrate: https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-web...
I haven't had that experience at all with them before. I also don't put much stock in one off experiences from someone who is admittedly not in a situation that almost anyone else, much less someone registering their domains through GoDaddy currently, would find themselves in (i.e. operating an online casino and engaging in behavior that is very obviously a legal/ToS gray area at best).
> One is that since we are a casino…

This is kinda buried but the whole scenario makes a lot more sense with that context.

If it is extremely critical, MarkMonitor.

Otherwise, Porkbun or Cloudflare Domains if you're ok using their DNS.

What's good about MarkMonitor? All I see is Gartner-friendly buzzwords and AI generated "business people".
They specialize in domains management for businesses who consider their domain to be _very_ important. Think Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Wikipedia... (all of those are listed as clients on the wiki page)

As in "pay a lot of money", and we'll dedicate someone to your domain who makes sure that "giving a domain to a stranger without any documents" will _never_ happen.

a number of the largest companies that used to be 'clients' of markmonitor have now basically become their own domain registrars and have a direct relationship with ICANN. Amazon for instance. It's curious that google was one and has offloaded it to squarespace.
I'm pretty sure google never used them for their own domains, and the whole markmonitor/squarespace thing was their "google domains" product where they sold registrar services to others. Besides that they also are a registry for .app/.dev and others, but don't sell them via their own registrar anymore.
This is the best approach IMHO if you're a large, extremely valuable company registering a lot of domains.
I want to know this, too. My enterprise clients tend to like using it but that certainly doesn't mean anything.
See other sibling comments to yours, but you basically have named support contacts who would have been the human-in-the-loop ensuring that a situation like OP's can't happen.

I haven't spoken to them in like a decade, but they also offered other monitoring stuff like notifying you of likely phishing registrations, etc. And it's no longer novel now with options like Route53, but they used to be one of the only solutions with proper RBAC/delegation/audit logs.

Literally anywhere else.
I suspect you mean register/renew:

Depends. If it's something really high priority (like main domain for a large corporation) I'd likely be paying CSC 4 digit sums per domain per year.

For stuff a tier below that I'd be looking at companies that are serious about security and happen to do domains as well e.g. Cloudflare, Amazon

Dnsimple, they seem reasonably competent and don't have a bottom of the barrel monetization scheme.
Literally anywhere else, GoDaddy is utter trash and has been for many years. Namecheap is the one I use personally.
Namecheap has had its own host of issues like a few years back breaking hsts and causing tons of sites to break for quite a while and their response was basically oh well. That incident along made me move my domains off to porkbun.
Porkbun uses cloudflare as their DNS backend, and has accidentally issued certs for domains hosted on them (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40455508 was one instance).

Since cloudflare is basically the only registrar that will not allow you to host nameservers anywhere else I'd be weary to use them (even indirectly).

Realistically you should never use the registrars dns to begin with. But you can set your own dns with porkbun, I have customs dns on all of my domains. I especially have been doing that since the Namecheap hsts issue. Can't trust any of them.
> Realistically you should never use the registrars dns to begin with

Could you elaborate why?

I do wish Namecheap's Dynamic DNS support supported IPv6 though...
Porkbum or Gandi or name.com
Gandi's support collapsed a couple years ago. Couldn't even get ahold of anyone with a pulse to help with transfers.
Porkbun has really suspect engineering. Crashing on symbols in passwords for instance.
Never had a problem like you describe.
Gandi has started increasing prices like crazy in the last few years.