I guess this is a cautionary tale.

I was recently having issues with my Gmail account that’s tied to my Epik ( a domain registrar ) account, so when I was supposed to renew my domain, I didn’t receive any e-mails about it. When I decided to randomly check on my website, it seemed to be down. So I checked Epik and a domain that usually cost £15 a year to renew now cost £400 to renew as it was expired.

As a teenager who does not have £400 to spend on a domain, I decided to just wait until the domain fully expired and buy it for a cheaper price.

After some time, the domain fully expired and GoDaddy decided to buy it as soon as it did, and charged me £2,225 to renew the domain. I don’t understand how a price that large is justified, considering that my website gets barely any visitors and I basically only use the domain for hosting stuff. No idea how hiking prices this much is legal

  • lemmyvoreEnglish
    15•4 months ago

    Namecheap has extra rules if you want to use an API (minimum money spent with them, minimum of domains managed with them etc.) — GoDaddy style.

    Keep that in mind, if you need an API (for DDNS or for obtaining wildcard TLS certificates) you’ll have to use a separate service for DNS.

    • chiisanaAEnglish
      13•4 months ago

      You really should have separate services for registration, DNS and hosting. That way you’re not held hostage by a single provider.

      • @hddsx@lemmy.caEnglish
        2•4 months ago

        Why should I post someone else for DNS records if namecheap is handling it just fine for my use case?

    • @kitnaht@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9•4 months ago

      DDNS with Namecheap is as simple as hitting a URL with a /GET request from the IP you want it to point to. No limitations. No special requirements.

    • @NateNate60@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3•4 months ago

      I have a script running that uses the Namecheap API to automatically get wildcard certs from Let’s Encrypt. I didn’t pay a dime for this. Did something change?

      • lemmyvoreEnglish
        2•4 months ago

        Maybe you meet the conditions for it? It hasn’t been possible to access their API without meeting the conditions for at least a year now.

        You don’t pay directly for the API, the latest conditions AFAIR are 20+ domains and $50+ on account balance and $50+ spent in the last 2 years.

        They also want you to whitelist the IPs that access the DNS which makes it unusable for DynDNS, but at least they have a separate URL for that.