Which privacy respecting domain registrar would you guys recommend?
- I have to own my domain
- I don’t want my money to go to companies like Google that have terrible privacy practices
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I would like to know the suggestions people have for this too.
Some guys from TPB launched https://njal.la/
Njalla owns your domains instead of you. Not sure if that is a good idea. Besides this company has neglected to create a privacy policy.
It’s quite a stuggle. Personally I use Key Systems GMBH.
I don’t believe you can get privacy with a domain registrar since they all phone home to ICANN. If you want real privacy then you can run your service on TOR or i2p.
It’s a bit hard to find, but they do have a ToS: https://njal.la/tos
3.3 Domain names are registered under the name of 1337 and not under your name, unless you specifically so request. You are aware that this means that 1337 is registered as the registered owner of the domain name. However, 1337’s position is that of a middleman and 1337 shall not have actual ownership of the domain name in relation to you. Such ownership shall vest in you from date of registration of the domain name. You may however at any time request that the registration of the domain name is transferred to you formally meaning that you will be registered as the owner of the domain name with the registry operator in question. A precondition of the transfer is, however, that you agree in writing to be bound by any agreements and terms to which 1337 is bound as a registrant of the domain name.
It says you’re in control of the domains you purchase and Njalla is just the middleman and cannot have any control over the domain. They also say they can change the terms at any time, but there isn’t really anything saying they have to inform you about it.
Overall, them hiding the ToS page from their main website (it’s not even in the sitemap!) and missing the line about informing users about updates to the ToS makes me a bit wary of them.
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Porkbun is a bad option.
They issue TLS certificates to their customers without their permission. And the customer cannot revoke that self-issued certificate by themselves.
They tamper with DNS CAA records.
They are the worst!
They rewrote the DNS CAA records for my domain without my permission and issued TLS certificates from Google Trust Services and Sectigo without my consent.
If you don’t want to be issued a fake TLS certificate, don’t use Porkbun!
Njalla’s TOS has a clause “6. Your data”. Is this not sufficient?
Gandi’s Whois protection is inadequate. The state/province where you live is always publicly available.
1984 does not have AAAA records on some DNS servers and IPv6 support is inadequate.
I’m currently using Porkbun and have not experienced either of those issues. I had to manually apply for the SSL certificate, and the certificate came from R3. I’m also not seeing any DNS records I didn’t set.
OP’s first requirement was that they have to own their domain. This automatically eliminates Njalla as according to their own ToS, Njalla owns the domain and simply lets you manage it.
I cannot speak for Gandi or 1984, as I have not used them.
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I have not experienced this at all. This review sounds very dramatic, if not fake. No CAA tampering either and I highly doubt that this is true.
I second the recommendation for Porkbun. I’ve had a great experience with them so far and have all of my domains there. I also use Netlify to deploy my site, including their nameservers (Netlify DNS), so I can issue and manage SSL certificates through Netlify instead as well.
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Lots of terrible reviews on njal.la. I was just about to sign up with them but decided to do a little more research.
Apparently, they regularly shut down people’s sites and offer no refunds. Customer service either doesn’t respond to inquiries or they respond rudely.
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Any thoughts on Cloudfare for domain registrar?
I think it’s pretty unfortunate that Cloudflare Registrar locks you in to their DNS service exclusively, but I do register some domains with them when I also want to use their DNS.
I want to get a custom domain, which will be used for my personal email, and I might use it for my own website in the future. Which domain registrar would be the best option right now?
I personally use Porkbun. Worked great, free WHOIS privacy and good pricing.
The issues people commented above regarding Porkbun, I have not encountered.
I’m currently considering hostinger.com
Are there any issues with this registrar?
The only thing I know about Hostinger is that like 10-12 years ago they created a (shady) free “reseller” company for people to try and “start their own web hosting business,” and then they shut it down and stole all the clients that their resellers got for themselves. (Hostinger also had a terrible reputation at the time for other reasons too)
This was a super long time ago (and really only people who were in the web hosting industry in the early 2010s would even know about this), but now they’re forever associated with scam behavior in my mind lol