They're not competent. Data point: they sent me an email saying my domain would automatically renew in 30 days, and then renewed it in 2. While sure, I'm not upset that my domain renewed, I ended up moving to porkbun because I expect a registrar to accurately tell me dates and times. If you say something is happening in X days, I expect it to happen in X days.
Labeling a whole company with millions of domains under management "not competent" because they sent one wrong email or there's a misunderstanding on how it works on the customer side?
And exactly, I expect clear and correct communications. If you say "your domains will automatically renew in 1 month" then it needs to be in one month.
One thing that sucks when moving registrar is that some (Namecheap, Porkbun, Enom/Tucows) doesn't let you set DNS entries before migration. Move reg, updated NS and then add entries.
So, my process now is to put DNS service OUTSIDE the registrar - so that switching one doesn't have to impact the others.
Why these providers don't let me create the NS Zone before transfer confounds me.
Porkbun definitely lets you do that, they allow you to add an "external" domain which runs on their DNS (actually Cloudflare) but isn't registered through them, then you can seamlessly transfer the domain in to Porkbun later.
IIRC Spaceship (Namecheaps soft-relaunch) lets you set up your DNS records as soon as you initiate a transfer to them, before it completes, so the records are ready as soon as the nameservers switch over. Not sure about the original Namecheap, I haven't used them for a while.
They shouldn't publish a zone for a domain they don't control (yet). Regardless of who whois says manages the domain, if I were to query the new registrar's servers they could theoretically send people somewhere else than what was intended with the currently published zone information.
I don't want them to publish, I just want to create them before migration. Other registrar's had it for a while and Namecheap for sure still don't (maybe their new UI but they lost me years ago)
DNS is hierarchical so as long as the root servers point elsewhere it doesn't matter what they publish and once the root servers are updated then the new servers are the authoritive ones.
I point my computer to use a local DNS server, I ask it to resolve an ad domain... the request doesn't go out to the root servers, it gets RPZ denied at the DNS server. The root doesn't mean anything if the local DNS server claims to know the answer to your query. The same goes for a registrar's DNS server that is publishing zones it doesn't own.
What you are describing is a forwarding DNS query resolver, which can be configured to directly answer queries without forwarding them upstream in the DNS hierarchy. This is sometimes used for ad-blocking, but the archetypical example is the DNS resolvers your ISP usually provides. Their purpose is to forward your queries to the nameserver responsible for the zone you ask about.
Domain registrars, however, usually do not operate forwarding DNS resolvers. They typically only answer queries for zones that they are responsible for, and give you an NXDOMAIN response for anything else. For this reason, nobody would use a non-forwarding DNS as a resolver for their computer since it would make it near impossible to reach hosts on the Internet (unless you happen to query a record for one of the zones they provide service for).
I've been very happy with Dynadot. I don't like that domain hosting is just one of many products for Cloudflare and others (as we've seen come up for Google!) and have had bad experiences with Namecheap et al.
Porkbun here, and some AWS (which is a reseller of someone else iirc). Also we have a bunch of older domains at OpenSRS but tend not to use them for new work.
I tried cloudflare but am worried they're going to start restricting features or something because of how aggressively they try to upsell shit I don't need.
They say they sell domains at cost, which is a red flag since it means people who only use them as a register are going to be the first to go when they start loading up the enshittification bandwagon.
I don't care about the price of domains. They're relatively cheap even with the mark up from your typical registrar. What I care about is peace of mind that I won't lose my domain due to an incompetent registrar, or will have to scramble to transfer everything again because of reasons outside of my control. Cloudflare doesn't offer that.
I've now decided to move to Namecheap. Idk how solid they are, but they seem to have been selling domains for a very long time.
Any recommendations for a quality domain registrar? Might as well get started with the migration