TL;DR: Credit card was stolen, Namecheap penalized me for that and then blackmailed by locking all domains.

This isn't about blackmail as jewsin writes in the comments, it's about the reputation a business suffers with a chargeback. All you would need to do is reverse the chargeback and the full charge would go away.

Disclosure: I work for Namecheap.

Still, I think my original points stand. I find Namecheap locking out unrelated domains and redirecting traffic unethical and in bad faith of the service provider / customer relationship. Not to mention that the domains continued to point to parking pages even after I paid up.

I'm sorry as well for the parking page situation - my guess is it didn't immediately propagate, but I'd have to investigate further as to why that happened. Usually, it's not about redirecting traffic but just not letting you get into your account. This does not sound like it should have happened at all. I sincerely apologize that this is what you encountered.

p.s. I love how trying to genuinely be helpful has resulted in an onslaught of downvotes. I'm going to assume you helped balance that out with an upvote. So thanks :)

I wish people wouldn't do that. It does appear that Namecheap has behaved very poorly in this case, intentionally or otherwise. Sadly, downvoting a person who works for an organisation has become a proxy for downvoting the organisation itself on HN recently, which doesn't seem constructive, particularly if that person is trying to share relevant information and/or improve the situation.

Sent my ticket number via the contact form on the website from your profile. I see that you spearheaded the SOPA membership surge - it's what got me to join in the first place.

Please write a blog post about this.

Also, $240 because of one chargeback, and doing the above while the customer is trying to sort out a fraud issue? Neither of those sounds like normal practice for a responsible domain registrar either.

Obviously there are two sides to every story and we're only seeing one here, but that one does look pretty bad for Namecheap.

I must say that I have never verified this myself, mostly because I've never needed it that bad. At least something worth looking into if that problem arises.

(Can actually confirm that from this month's experience, so it's even freshly verified :)

(Full disclosure: I work at Namecheap)

They're a bit more expensive when it comes to domains but we're talking single dollars a year here.

Many pluses: predictable, can be administered using the AWS CLI, consolidated billing with other AWS services. Heck, can even register domains from the CLI.

Only downside as others have pointed out is that Gandi doesn't make it at all easy to hide your name or company contact information.

So you are recommending someone switch over privacy concerns from namecheap to Amazon in story about how Amazon is leaking private Customer data.....

Really...

Also, the issue with all domains being shown is a bug. If you have a ticket number regarding this, please let me know and I'll investigate this further because it should be resolved.

But their "redesign" and presumably the backend changes tied to it (or lack of them, whatever the real case is) resulted in the worst experience I've ever had with this kind of service in years, culminating in what was the last straw - one of my domains getting shut down five times in a single month due to bogus "domain contacts verification" procedures, which their support wasn't able to solve from early December to when I finally decided to move away in mid-January (from a short exchange after I moved away I assume it's still broken today as they were apparently "investigating it" even after I was gone. That after having it in some or some other way "fixed" for about three times during the previous support exchanges.) Honestly though during that time my tickets mostly kept bouncing back and forth through customer reps that insisted on politely suggesting things like "to check my spam folder", even though I specifically explained every time that I was in full control of my mail servers and that it is them who don't deliver any kind of verification emails to those servers, so there was really nothing that could even end up in "a spam folder" and that yes, I actually thoroughly checked that, several times over. Yet my requests for them to check their own mail logs because I'm here actually losing access to my domains without being able to do anything about it were each time politely swept under the rug with generic assurances like "they're working on it and will keep me informed"... Then quickly closed the ticket as fixed. Every time after the one particular domain went dark (and with another domain randomly flipping into bogus unverified states in the frontend interface, clearly lingering on the edge of the same fate), the domain was reactivated either by me or the customer support, was either set to have its contacts covered by WhoisGuard (which doesn't even use the contacts verification process at all), or at a later point even manually set back to fully verified by their techs (and one time completely having all my zone data wiped without explanation or apparently without whoever caused it having a backup at hand to restore it from) - only to again and again end up suspended as "unverified" several days later, losing me access to its emails, websites, everything...

Now I could still go on and on about how clunky the entire new interface compared to the old one is (yes, the original was lackluster, but not even remotely this level bad and in fact I've never had a single technical issue with it, other than being somewhat hard to navigate) and that ever since the redesign the new frontend frequently displays outdated or plain wrong information, crashes with cryptic errors, sometimes just decides to log you out five times in five minutes for no reason, but I think this is getting too long as it is anyway, so enough.

When I finally grew tired of running through their customer support in a neverending circle (to their credit, they were always very polite and nice, but it felt like that's all that Namecheap support was really trained for. And that clearly doesn't make my domains magically work there), I moved to Gandi just basing on their overall popularity and good reputation with a few people. Already in a week time I had two great support experiences with them and got my issues resolved each time in literally a single step of exchange. In the first case I've received about a page-length of actual technical reply from their support rep that not only bothered to carefully read through several issues that I ran into when trying to run a Python app on their web hosting platform that I ordered for the domains moved there, they even included a how-to custom tailored to my specific use case that was way beyond what I originally asked for and that ended up saving me quite some time discovering it on my own, and also acknowledged that they had a major issue in their documentation system and that they had it quickly fixed in meantime. Now second time was less technical, as I accidentally burned a discount code while customizing and re-customizing some orders in what was probably an unexpected way for their interface, that ended in the code never being applied to any order but still ended up as used and lost... I wrote down the problem in a few sentences, customer support quickly verified it and issued me a new replacement code right with the initial reply in what had to be less than an hour. Can't really say I'll be missing Namecheap any time soon.