As a namecheap customer I completely support the greenfield approach to what it means to be a registrar. However, what I want from a registrar is to be the best registrar. I don’t want hosting, email, or other services, I want a great DNS interface with an API that I can scope permissions on, and cheap and predictable name registration. That is it.
I'm with you, including NC customership and excluding a want of registrars to provide even DNS, let alone mail and hosting.
That said, GoDaddy makes about half of it's annual revenue from it's 'core' business (domain name sales) over again in 'apps and commerce' (stuff you and I don't, but clearly many other less enlightened people want).
The 'A&C' segment grew 13% in 2023 as opposed to 2% of core business.
I don't think it has to be an either/or thing, solong as a registrar isn't employing all sorts of dark patterns and ruining UX for the sake of upsell opportunities.
I feel like this is the sort of thing Alphabet was supposed to do, but instead Google’s ad machine steamrolled any actually new ideas and even now, after having OpenAI start to take a bite of their lunch, Google’s ad business is calling all the shots on what is/isn’t allowed to be built.
If Google had the guts to put a bunch of teams in a new company under alphabet with the explicit goal to disrupt Google Search via any means necessary they’d be in a much better positions today.
Real respect to Namecheap, this takes guts to commit too.
I used and was impressed by Namecheap EasyWP, which seems to be part of what they’ve folded into Spaceship. They really delivered on high performance, serverless, cheap WordPress. Moreover, they proved that Namecheap doing greenfield produces starkly better results than what I’d come to expect from their main website and last-gen hosting.
However, EasyWP also ultimately lost me because they just never implemented DMARC/DKIM/SPF or automatic backups. I’m on board with necessary cuts to legacy and ecosystem compat, but missing these features isn’t that, it’s just an incomplete website – and solving it with plugins and manually synced external services significantly detracts from the value prop. And I’m not seeing either feature explicitly advertised on spaceship.com.
After a quick chat with support, Spaceship also supports neither DMARC/DKIM/SPF on website-sent emails, nor automatic backups. They recommended using a third party plugin to connect the web hosting part to the personal email hosting part, but even then you just get SPF and DKIM, not DMARC.
Namecheap got at least one domain from me as a Google Domains refugee. Most went to Porkbun, but there were a few domains with comparatively esoteric TLDs that only Namecheap supported.
Not sure how this qualifies as "disrupting itself". Namecheap sells domain names. Spaceship (as far as I can tell) is domains + hosting + email. So it's not like they are taking anything away from their core offering, just providing add-on services, all with a shiny new UI. Funny enough Namecheap itself already offers all of those things, so this is basically a rebrand (probably to sound more premium and enterprise-y than "Namecheap").
It took me a lot of scrolling to figure out what services were actually being offered. Sounds like pretty standard cpanel hosting. Glad to see this service from a reputable and well liked provider. Is this a disruptive idea in 2024?
I'm honestly tempted by the shared hosting because of the price alone. No, I wouldn't host anything too serious there but that's way cheaper than I've seen from someone like DreamHost (where I have an old account that's not worth migrating super old sites from 10+ years ago off). I'd like to move my blog off wordpress.com and have a semi-managed WP instance instead (so I don't have to pay Wordpress and arm and a leg for plugins). I don't want to manage a VPS, I do enough of that for my day and side job and I did that for many years for my blog and hated it.
Longtime Namecheap customer here. This is a really good idea, even if they're only doing a redesign. I recall the last Namecheap redesign was a little bumpy, because their interface went from web 1.0 to web 2.0 overnight, and I felt a little disoriented which is not fun when you're trying to update your DNS records.
From what I gather Spaceship is a new company which provides similar services to Namecheap, but is actually owned by Namecheap, ostensibly to get a fresh start without the organizational cruft and tech debt they've accrued. Why they made it a new brand rather than "Namecheap 2.0" I have no idea.
It's worked out well enough for them given they've become the 2nd largest registrar, but yeah I suppose it won't hurt to play both sides by having a more premium sounding secondary brand.
same with Porkbun. a bank employee, who was going through my card transactions, asked what Porkbun was. i love Porkbun, but they sound like and share the same number of characters as the pornography company.
I believe that is answered in the link:
"Someone else mentioned the issues and limitations with our current brand and we want to try and move beyond that and I think we're on the right track"
Will Spaceship will do some of the same things as Namecheap in time where they sell for one price, and don't tell you upfront that year 2 will be more, or it's changed before the next registration and you get a pleasant surprise?
They do tell you up front... They show you the price for the first year, then a dimmer price for year 2 on. I really don't understand where your confusion is, are you buying from their website or the app? Maybe the app doesn't show that?
I personally think that's a reading comprehension issue on your part, but maybe submit feedback with specifics about what's confusing to you/what you'd like to see instead?
If you run a search for a domain such as readingcomprehension.com:
Namecheap does show renewal prices; they also interchange it in the readingcomprehension.io with a "Retails at" price, which does not mean renew. Those are the prices that can change.
It's an easy miss.. before diagnosing a 'comprehension' critique and feeling entitled to the labour of others to convince you otherwise - double-checking the page (below the fold) might save you from the irony.
Clarity matters, both in web design and in critiques. I was hoping you might go do a search and read below the fold.
It wasn't meant as a jab, I'm trying to figure out where your confusion is. Even in that imgur gif, I can clearly see what the renewal price will be.
I think what you're wishing for is another line that indicates the price from year 2 on? I could see how being more explicit about what that "renewal price" means would help clear this kind of confusion up. I don't work at namecheap, I have no power over this kind of thing, I'm just interested to see where your confusion is and what would help with it.
Based on arbitrary virtue signaling by the Namecheap CEO, is Spaceship gonna give customers one-week notice that their accounts are being dropped for committing the crime of being born in the wrong country, like he did at Namecheap?
> If we were virtue signaling we wouldn't willingly be giving up a not non significant part of our business. This hurts us financially but it's the right thing to do, at least for us. Your leader/country is already killing innocent civilians/ukranians. They are putting it all on the line with their lives. They didn't ask for this yet they are dying for it. Change needs to come and the only way it can is for the Russian population to put it on the line as well.
Yeah this decision really rubbed me the wrong way when it happened. Like many of the western sanctions, it disproportionately affected ordinary Russians over oligarchs. Even worse, it probably disproportionately affected what little scraps of free press remained in Russia. I understand Namecheap's logic, especially from the early days of the war, but it left a sour taste in my mouth about relying on them for business.
> Based on arbitrary virtue signaling by the Namecheap CEO, is Spaceship gonna give customers one-week notice that their accounts are being dropped for committing the crime of being born in the wrong country, like he did at Namecheap?
Your question contains incredible entitlement. Namecheap's staff is mostly Ukrainian and located in Kharkiv, the city that saw combat on its streets, was almost encircled, and for more than two years has suffered under daily Russian shelling and missile attacks, death and destruction unleashed by Russians are everyday companions there. Do you think Germans had any moral right to demand continuation of services from the UK when Luftwaffe was bombing London? Or that Germans had nothing to do with the Nazi regime? Just incredible.
Everyone serving customers from Russia is complicit in helping the Kremlin keep up the illusion of normalcy: that nothing is wrong, that life goes on, that all you need to do is just shut off your mind and ignore the depraved war crimes that your society commits every day. And the crimes are indeed committed by the whole society: Putin alone is not building missiles, he is not programming their targets or piloting bomber planes, he is not manufacturing artillery shells, he is not on the frontline firing them at Kharkiv, he is not the one raping, looting and torturing - just like Hitler in his bunker was not waging the war against the whole world on his own, but required the overwhelming support of "ordinary Germans" to put his ideas into action.
And before anyone says that "ordinary citizens" can't do anything: then whose responsibility are the things that going on in a country? Are Argentinians responsible? Are Italians? Should the Swedes intervene and bomb Moscow to ashes to slap the society back into respecting basic human decency?
