For anyone that wasn't around, a few years back Namecheap decided without any warning to just instantly drop all their customers from an entire country because of political ideology. I wouldn't trust them at all since they've shown they're more interested in making political statements than running a business. You might be the one they randomly drop next, sending you scrambling.
The full context is that they gave them 1 week to migrate before termination.
The reason is that namecheap is an American company in name only. The bulk of their staff is in Ukraine, only the well paid execs reside in America.
Personally the short grace period and (very) lackluster attempt at notifying affected customers made me lose trust in them, even though I agree with sanctions on a moral level.
I moved my two dozen domains to porkbun. As a bonus they have actually qualified support staff, being with namecheap so long I had forgotten what it was like to have support immediately understand DNS-specific terms.
I don't consider the country name essential context. The point is that if any country does something the company doesn't like, they've shown they'll just drop the country. Whether you agree with what the country did or not.
AFAIK most of Namecheap’s employees are Ukrainian. It’s quite a bit more than “doesn’t like” when a country is actively trying to kill you and your family, more like “hate with the passion of a thousand burning suns”.
Seems like the point here is that that country did something that was pretty, pretty bad (in their opinion, anyway) and decided to abide by their principles rather than maximize profit. I assume there are other capitalists out there who made the other decision.
I’m OK with that. I know which of those I’d prefer to work with. Sounds like you do, too.
>Some missing essential context: pretty sure this was Russian users in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine
And what the bloody hell does it matter? If there's one site where I'd expect little in the way of always idiotic Rah Rah war fever, it's this one, yet here it is. A country's government should be distinguished from its people, and treating them all at the same level as if they were garbage without knowing their circumstances is plainly, obviously brainless as it's always been. During the First World War many people started piling shit on anyone with a German last name because "they're our enemy!" and the second one, many people did the same with hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese immigrants. Truly, do intelligent people with a brain really feel a need to support such a mentality today?
What Namecheap did in its own minor turf didn't require balls. It was the easiest sort of falsely brave kowtowing to a popular sentiment. Balls is what's required to ignore politically and socially fashionable labels for the sake of deeper principles.
What deeper principles do you mean, profit above all else, like IBM and countless other companies chose to do business with Nazi Germany?
Russia was and continues to rain down missiles and artillery on cities where most of Namecheap's employees live and work while Russian population cheers for their extermination.
Refusal of service is hardly comparable to Japanese internment camps.
You are capable of making the distinction between IBM selling devices directly to the Nazi government knowing what it might do with them, and Namecheap selling hosting services to average Russians who might be using said hosting to say, run a small business for their basic livelihood, yes?
Russia's government fires missiles at Ukraine, where Namecheap employees live, Some dude in Samara who hosts his family's restaurant page through Namecheap doesn't fire those missiles.
Spare the bullshit. Things like this rarely do much moral good, and speak poorly of the mentality of those who support them. The comparison to the kind of idiot righteousness that caused people to consider all Germans or all Japanese enemies to be derided because of specific things done by a government is in the same vein as this.
> You are capable of making the distinction between IBM selling devices directly to the Nazi government knowing what it might do with them, and Namecheap selling hosting services to average Russians who might be using said hosting to say, run a small business for their basic livelihood, yes?
They are different sides of the same thing. Access to foreign goods and services is a crucial part of maintaining public support for the war. Much like Nazis, Russians too put a lot of effort into maintaining normalcy, that is, keeping up the appearance as if nothing was wrong, that the population should not question what is going on, that they should turn off their brains and focus on running their little lives and doing what they are told to do.
> Russia's government fires missiles at Ukraine, where Namecheap employees live, Some dude in Samara who hosts his family's restaurant page through Namecheap doesn't fire those missiles.
It is exactly the opposite: the men in Kremlin don't fire any missiles at Ukraine. Putin has not raped, tortured or murdered a single person in Ukraine, much like Hitler didn't personally kill a single Jew. Putin doesn't manufacture missiles, doesn't program their targets, doesn't fly bombers or man artillery guns. He is not one of the hundreds of thousands that went to Ukraine for bucks, then returned and renovated a house or opened a restaurant with the money earned killing Ukrainians. Putin would not have any influence on the world without millions of willing executioners who choose to follow him and put his ideas into action, or at least turn a blind eye to it.
You are retelling the same old myth of "Germans as innocent bystanders" that we know from the WWII: pretending that everything was the fault of only one man, and the rest were just following the orders and trying to get by in challenging times.
The actual truth is far more darker, and raises the difficult question: how do you deal with a whole country full of people filled with bloodlust? In Germany's case, it took the total destruction of the country, the hanging of its leaders, systemic banishment of their supporters from public life, and 50 years of Allied oversight to put Germany back on track of being a normal country.
> For anyone that wasn't around, a few years back Namecheap decided without any warning to just instantly drop all their customers from an entire country because of political ideology.
No, not because of political ideology - most of Namecheap's employees were in Kharkiv, the city that fell under siege and almost got encircled. Namecheap's employees could've ended up in mass graves like those in the cities that ultimately fell to the invaders.
And yet here you are, demanding service - like Eva Braun complaining to Harrods during the Blitz that her orders aren't arriving on time. Don't you really understand how entitled and insane it sounds?
Indeed, when artillery and missiles are raining down on you, and enemy forces are on the verge of encircling you, and the population of your enemy is in a feverish war hysteria and gloating about running over you in days, and that "the masters are back", you do not have much interest in "running a business" as if nothing had happened.
