Namecheap

Namecheap is a domain registrar, one of the big ones, with reasonable prices, free WHOIS privacy and an API. The API is why it is on this list: domains are something I register in batches, and a shopping cart is the wrong tool for a batch.

How I use it

A short script checks availability, registers a domain and sets the nameservers, all through the API. A second script runs on a schedule and lists what renews in the next thirty days, so nothing expires because an email went to spam. The moment a domain is registered, its DNS moves to another provider, because Namecheap's own DNS takes hours to propagate and the other takes seconds.

What surprised me is that the API has been stable for years. Calls I wrote a long time ago still work unchanged. What annoys me is the IP whitelist. The API refuses every request that does not come from an address you registered in advance, which means you cannot run the script from a laptop on a changing connection; it has to live on a machine with a fixed IP. That is a reasonable security choice and a real inconvenience, and it took me an afternoon to understand why a perfectly good request was being rejected. The second annoyance is pricing on renewal: the first year is cheap, the second is not, and the renewal reminder arrives close enough to the date that an account on a low balance gets a scare.

The contact details on a domain are worth getting right once, because changing them later on dozens of domains is tedious even with the API.

Who it is for

Anyone with more than a handful of domains, or anyone who registers them programmatically. For a single personal domain, any decent registrar will do and the API will not matter. Skip it if you want the registrar to also be your DNS; use it for registration and let a faster DNS provider do the rest.