I’d say for the last 5+ years, I’ve had all my domains registered through NameCheap. It was always far cheaper than renewing domains through a hosting company. Hosting companies are known for marking up prices on domain name renewals. This is why places like Namecheap were a great alternative, because they didn’t charge high prices. This is changing quickly though.
Inflation has been creeping in over the last few years, and it’s starting to hit Namecheap domain renewals. But is it inflation, or price gouging? I typically do 1 year renewals, and the price seems to increase every time. I found a renewal receipt from 2020 – total price was $13.16. The same renewal today (2024) is $17.16 on Namecheap.
Here’s the crazy thing – Cloudflare will only charge $10.44. They have clearly stated:
Cloudflare Registrar is a service for registering domain names that doesn’t mark up the price for doing so. It offers essentially the same services as other domain name registrars but without markups, without increased renewal fees, and with some additional security features. In essence, Cloudflare Registrar is free – the only cost is what is charged by registries and by ICANN.
https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/dns/what-is-cloudflare-registrar
It’s clear now how much Namecheap actually marks up the price. So where does this leave things? I’ve been slowly moving my domains over from Namecheap to Cloudflare when they are about to expire.
One thing to note:
Cloudflare requires your account to use their Nameservers. This would be the only downside.. you can’t use custom nameservers unless you have Cloudflare ‘Business’ which at the time of writing this would be $200/month. If you know for a fact you would never need to use custom nameservers, this isn’t a problem. In most cases, you likely wouldn’t need to. Also, just to clear things up, Cloudflare’s nameservers are separate from their proxy service. You DO NOT have to use their server proxies.
