I'm no longer a happy customer of Namecheap
2026-02-07 - Also available on Gopher
I've been a happy customer of Namecheap since July 13th 2011, when I registered the domain name dreamintech.net to create a technology news site with a couple of IRC friends from the #dreamincode channel. Back then I only knew about GoDaddy and LocaWeb (the defacto registrar and hosting company in Brazil), but my friends told me that this Namecheap registrar was the best. I won't lie, because of its name, I was a bit hesitant, but I registered with them anyway, since people on IRC never lie right? They were right, and I was pretty happy with their service during the last 14 years. It's the only domain registrar I had ever used, and I felt very good when the whole GoDaddy backing the Stop Online Piracy Act controversy [1] was happening and Namecheap was heralded online as the best registrar to move to. During almost 15 years I registered well over 20 domains with them, and recommended them to anyone that ever talked to me about getting a domain, I was an extremely loyal customer and championed their platform whenever possible. Their names were cheap, and even though their website was painful to use, it provided the service I wanted for good price and nothing more. Fastforward to January of this year 2026, and I get an email talking about price increases on some of my domains. I always ignored these, since I know that from time to time, the prices do go up, it's normal, but this time I noticed two things regarding a .eu domain that I own: - The registration price went up 2 USD (from $6.98 to $8.98) - The renewal price went up 1.50 USD (from $9.48 to $10.98) A 2 US dollar increase felt way more substantial than the regular increase over the years due to ICANN fees or simple registry fees going up. Also I noticed that the renewal price was different than the registration one. I always thought they were the same, apart from new domain deals registrars usually use to trick people into buying expensive domains. Because of these discrepancies I decided to look at the prices of similar domains with other registrars, and to my surprise, they were a lot cheaper, like $5 cheaper. This made me very furious, Namecheap was no longer cheap... I started searching for what happened, and apparently Namecheap started getting a pretty bad reputation when I wasn't looking [2][3]. I asked some friends IRL for suggestions on the current best registrar and they all recommended either CloudFlare or Porkbun. Searching Reddit and their recommendations line up with comments online. Since I wasn't looking forward to dealing directly with CloudFlare, given I don't like them very much, and their registrar is a loss-leader [4], I decided to register with Porkbun, which still uses CloudFlare [5], but I was willing to cope with this. Registering with Porkbun wasn't very pleasant since I had to perform the dreaded online ID verification process [6], which I'm fully against. This step almost made me ditch Porkbun, but I guess money and good customer service is a priority right now and I'm still conflicted about consenting to the whole process. I have currently moved 2 of my domains, including this one (nathancampos.me) to Porkbun without any issues, and I plan to move completely away from Namecheap as my domains near their expiry date this year.Moving away from Namecheap with ease ------------------------------------
As a side note I would like to document the process of quickly moving away from Namecheap and not having any down time. The first step you should take is to get a zone file from Namecheap. This can be done by bypassing their AI support chatbot and asking a human to retrieve it for you or you can also do it by visiting the following URL while logged in to your Namecheap account [7] and downloading a JSON file with all your DNS information. The downloaded JSON file can then be passed through this Python script provided by GitHub user ashleykleynhans [8]:#!/usr/bin/env python3 ############################################################################ # Generate DNS Zone file from Namecheap # # Modification History: # Date Version Modified by Description # 2016-03-11 1.0 Judotens Budiarto Initial creation # 2020-01-17 1.1 Andrew Resolve CAPTCHA issue # 2020-12-07 1.2 Dinis Cloudflare and AAAA record # support # 2022-08-30 1.3 Ashley Kleynhans Python3 and more DNS records # support, Refactored code to # break out of loop sooner, use # argparse to validate command # line arguments, option to # choose default or Cloudflare # format. Improved error # handling, autodetect domain # name. ############################################################################ import argparse import json RECORD_TYPES = { 1: 'A', 2: 'CNAME', 3: 'MX', 5: 'TXT', 8: 'AAAA', 9: 'NS', 10: 'URL Redirect', 11: 'SRV', 12: 'CAA', 13: 'ALIAS' } def get_args(): parser = argparse.ArgumentParser( description='Get Namecheap DNS records.', ) parser.add_argument( 'filename', type=str, help='Filename' ) parser.add_argument( '--format', '-format', '--f', '-f', type=str, required=False, default='default', choices={'default', 'cloudflare'}, help='Output format (default/cloudflare)' ) return parser.parse_args() def parse_dns_info(dns_info, output_format): items = [] if 'Result' in dns_info and\ 'CustomHostRecords' in dns_info['Result'] and\ 'Records' in dns_info['Result']['CustomHostRecords']: records = dns_info['Result']['CustomHostRecords']['Records'] else: raise KeyError('JSON is in an unexpected format') if not len(records): raise Exception('No DNS records found in JSON') for record in records: # Skip inactive records if not record['IsActive']: continue # Skip unknown record types if record['RecordType'] not in RECORD_TYPES.keys(): continue record_type = RECORD_TYPES[record['RecordType']] value = record['Data'] host = record['Host'] if record_type == 'MX': value = f"{record['Priority']} {value}" elif record_type == 'TXT': value = f'"{value}"' if output_format == 'cloudflare': domain = dns_info['Result']['DomainBasicDetails']['DomainName'] if host == '@': host = domain else: host = f'{host}.{domain}.' items.append([ host, str(record['Ttl']), 'IN', record_type, value ]) return items if __name__ == '__main__': try: args = get_args() filename = args.filename output_format = args.format file = open(filename, 'r') dns_info = json.loads(file.read()) file.close() records = parse_dns_info(dns_info, output_format) for record in records: print('\t'.join(record)) except (IOError, KeyError, Exception) as e: print(f'ERROR: {e}') except json.decoder.JSONDecodeError as e: print(f'ERROR: Unable to decode JSON from {filename}: {e}')After exporting the zone file you can follow Porkbun's tutorial on how to transfer a domain with minimal downtime [9] and don't forget to speed up the process by approving the transfer [10] as soon as you get the email from Namecheap. This are the steps that I followed to transfer my domains, so I hope it helps you do the same. Fuck Namecheap. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_GoDaddy#Backing_of_SOPA_and_resultant_boycott [2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/NameCheap/comments/1nbx5ie/renewals_pricing_is_out_of_control/ [3]: https://old.reddit.com/r/NameCheap/comments/yhhrzy/renewal_price_going_up_over_1200/ [4]: https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/19a1fsc/choosing_cloudflare_as_my_domain_registrar/kiib5vi/ [5]: https://porkbun.com/products/dns_management [6]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/hack-age-verification-company-shows-privacy-danger-social-media-laws [7]: https://ap.www.namecheap.com/Domains/dns/GetAdvancedDnsInfo?fillTransferInfo=false&domainName=YOURDOMAINNAME.tld [8]: https://gist.github.com/ashleykleynhans/69e4fb525d4f32d766313d3f9d22b688 [9]: https://kb.porkbun.com/article/89-how-to-transfer-a-domain-to-porkbun-with-no-downtime [10]: https://kb.porkbun.com/article/88-how-to-transfer-a-domain-from-namecheap-to-porkbun#expedite-transfer