I have always though of Namecheap as an inexpensive registrar with an amazing search function for finding domain names. Their beast mode let’s you browse literally hundreds of top level domains and they automatically generate names for you by adding prefixes like “try” or by deleting suffixes.
But there are quite a few other things they bring to the table that I had not realized until now:
- Free Domain Privacy with Whois Guard. They offer a free who masking. Rather than exposing your name and address directly, they mask it for you for free.
- They also offer a full DNS. I had not realized this and have always used another DNS provider like AWS, DigitalOcean for a fee or Netlify which does this for free. If you use “Basic DNS”, you get a full DNS server but it’s not super discoverable, you need to go to the “Advanced DNS” tab to work with it, it doesn’t show up in the main tab. I was confused because in other domains, you don’t get this and the basic domain just parks the domain. (Looking at you GoDaddy 🙂
- Domain Redirection for free. They support 301 and 302 redirection. So you just add a set of domains like “seconddomain.com” and point it to “http://primarydomain.com” and it does a 301 redirect. Pretty cool. You can also do this with Advanced DNS and CNAMES, but this is super easy.
- Mail Forwarding. They will forward up to 100 email names from any domain, you just enter a name like “info” and then the email address where it goes to like “press@anothercompany.com” and it just works. So while it is not a real email server, it does allow you to create new initiatives and then the mail appears in your company. As an aside, if you are already using Google Workspace (fka GSuite), you get this service for free with their Domain Alias feature and adding MX records to the Namecheap DNS.
Quite a bargain and a well named service, it’s just cheap (but good!).
