I’ve been with Hover for years and manage my email accounts, domains, and nameservers through them since a popular all-in-one hosting provider put my website on ice after one of their server farms burnt down in Utah (didn’t even know that my server was located in Utah) and it took the technicians 8 days to restore services.
With Hover I can separate the hosting of the website and the DNS and email. So, if there’s a problem with the hosting provider I simply switch the nameservers elsewhere. Also, Hover doesn’t sell email addresses, which some of the cheaper hosting providers do. Last not least: Hover hates bots and has qualified professionals solving your problem in English!
Just to throw another name into the pot, I now use 20i.com. I have a reseller account with them and the pricing is way better than my previous registrar Fasthosts. Even without the reseller account, they have decent pricing.
I was going to renew some domains with Kualo today. I knew they were not the cheapest, but I was familiar with the setup and there were no issues.
For some reason Kualo have become pretty expensive and it was almost £16 a year now for .com or .net, which sounded excessive when you add them up and remember this is annual, so I have decided to give Namecheap a go with one domain and then follow with others if the transfer is smooth.
It seems the process is being held up for 5 days by the releasing registrar and in the meantime I cannot set the custom nameservers, which is a bit of a pain. Hopefully it will just inherit the existing ones.
I had a senior moment thinking about having to set the child nameservers for my nameserver domain, forgetting that I no longer have a dedicated server… In this case the account domain points to my web host’s nameservers so it should be just like the others I guess.
I have been using Namecheap recently, and just moved there 3 of my domains, including my main EldarGezalov.com. They do take their time to update the DNS settings (I had some downtime while transferring), etc, but once it’s done, everything works fine.
I’m actually going to move the BlocsMaster.com from Squarespace to another server (with a Blocs-made website), and while I can keep domain in Squarespace, I think I might just move everything to Namecheap sooner than later.
Well, the downtime was due to the transfer of the domain (I guess I should have pointed it out), but the process also involved changing some DNS settings, TXT records, etc.
To go into detail, I host my website on Firebase Hosting, and it involves verifying a domain with TXT record, which was deleted in the process of transferring to Namecheap.
I think this may have something to do with how namecheap operates with domain registration moves. They tend to set up the domain and have it point to a standard holding page. This leaves the customer free to change the DNS record through the domain dashboard. I sometimes forget to do this and only realise my mistake a few days later. But, once the record is changed, propagation is fairly quick. But, support is quick and via online chat with this company, so most issues can be resolved almost instantly. I’ve been with them for years and have had nothing but great service from them.
Thanks for sharing! It’s nice to know their support is there when it’s needed (hopefully not often). In any case, after using GoDaddy a few years ago, any standard support will feel like a premium priority support to me.
The great irony is that a lot of clients have come to me because they signed up with GoDaddy for hosting, domain registration or Office 365 and now stuck in a mess that needs to be resolved.
These tend to be small startups that went out and signed up for things without any understanding. I move them to my reseller server for hosting, but that isn’t always enough to stop the headaches with GoDaddy.
@hendon52 A lot of options are basically unavailable at this stage while waiting for the transfer, however looking at this support page below and judging by the experience of @PeteSharp I hope the existing custom name servers will be maintained by default following migration to Namecheap.
I was generally OK with Kualo and accepted paying a dollar or two more a year but prices seem to have doubled from where they were originally and not helped when VAT is added at the final stage.
EDIT Just found this followup article on minimising downtime following migration. It looks like you would mainly have issues if you were using the nameservers associated with your previous registrar.
The only real issues I’ve ever experienced with transfers is where the original site uses PHP applications that require connection to a mySQL database.Normally, the server information would be set up as “localhost” when installing such scripts, which seems to work very well. However, some scripts are installed using an actual IP for the database server. This can cause issues after a migration as the original server still serves the database, whilst the website itself is on the new server. Once this is understood, it’s relatively easy to solve the issue by just changing all database info to use localhost instead of specific host servers. On the few occasions where that has happened, Namecheap have come to the rescue and sorted the issue.
