It's cheap and it's a big company. They are basically the Walmart of domain registration. Out of having to deal with something like 40 or 50 registrars and resellers over the years I give them a slightly above average rating. Really, for all the bashing this thread people are giving there are far worse. They aren't great, but things will probably work with them.
I'll talk about alternatives now. Yeah, I know Gandi is cool, but they want too much money so majority of people pass them by.
If you want a really horrid example: 1and1 is a company that sets the bar. They buy up superbowl and print ads to lure in old people with cheap domain registrations (like $1 or so). Once sucked in they use a careful reading of the ICANN regulations to maximize difficulty in doing anything.
Oh, you want a transfer? That's going to be a week. Most things either go over the phone or through a panel that's down or nonfunctional half of the time.
Want to change nameserver delegation to your own DNS servers? Fuck you then. They wipe the current DNS records and process the change in a couple days. Your site can take a vacation.
Now, I hear a lot of people saying Namecheap is a good choice. They are ok, we recommend them but their panel likes to shit the bed and it can take hours to push DNS updates when things aren't running great there. They finally got off being an ENOM reseller, which is great. ENOM are assholes. I had a client that hired an ENOM reseller some time ago to register their domain and host their site. The reseller's company's owner got arrested and/or deported and while we were able to save the client's files the domain expired with no way for us to renew it. The good news is you can gripe up the chain to ENOM which will require a 5 year domain registration for $200.
That's it in a nutshell. They are a large company which has a service that mostly works for a cheaper price than arguably better options like Gandi.
Shout out to other terrible registrars like Yahoo Small Business (ugh)
"Now, I hear a lot of people saying Namecheap is a good choice. They are ok, we recommend them but their panel likes to shit the bed and it can take hours to push DNS updates when things aren't running great there."
You misunderstand. It very much should be pushed and updated at authoritative DNS servers within minutes. I'm aware of ISP and local DNS caches and this is not what I'm talking about.
You can query the authoritative DNS servers for any domain using dig.
Other issues with Google aside, their registrar service has been great. I have 2FA on my google login and the domain services are pretty nice all around. No upsell, some integrated service options (close to one-click). Included Google DNS service and free mail forwarding.
NOTE: I use the free mail forwarding so I can continue using some very old email addresses.
I've been a Google Suite reseller long enough to know not to trust Google with anything critical that can go wrong. I would imagine that when things go wrong there, the only recourse would be to blog, complain here, and no doubt file some sort of appeal to ICANN involving paying $1000 or so and having a month of downtime.
As bad as the ENOM example is, at least I don't have to spend a week hammering the same dude on a certain subcontinent that has no escalation path.
I'll talk about alternatives now. Yeah, I know Gandi is cool, but they want too much money so majority of people pass them by.
If you want a really horrid example: 1and1 is a company that sets the bar. They buy up superbowl and print ads to lure in old people with cheap domain registrations (like $1 or so). Once sucked in they use a careful reading of the ICANN regulations to maximize difficulty in doing anything.
Oh, you want a transfer? That's going to be a week. Most things either go over the phone or through a panel that's down or nonfunctional half of the time.
Want to change nameserver delegation to your own DNS servers? Fuck you then. They wipe the current DNS records and process the change in a couple days. Your site can take a vacation.
Now, I hear a lot of people saying Namecheap is a good choice. They are ok, we recommend them but their panel likes to shit the bed and it can take hours to push DNS updates when things aren't running great there. They finally got off being an ENOM reseller, which is great. ENOM are assholes. I had a client that hired an ENOM reseller some time ago to register their domain and host their site. The reseller's company's owner got arrested and/or deported and while we were able to save the client's files the domain expired with no way for us to renew it. The good news is you can gripe up the chain to ENOM which will require a 5 year domain registration for $200.
That's it in a nutshell. They are a large company which has a service that mostly works for a cheaper price than arguably better options like Gandi.
Shout out to other terrible registrars like Yahoo Small Business (ugh)