I thought that would be good enough, I went with WebFaction. But it seems they recently merged with GoDaddy, so even though I explicitly avoided them it turned out I didn't.
I'll mention FutureQuest. I've been with them for 20 years now. I'm certain they're not the cheapest, and I'm aware their website looks a decade or more out of date. But I've been extremely happy with them, they definitely wouldn't do something like GoDaddy did. They started as a small family business, and while they've grown a bit since then, many of the staff are still there. My occasional customer support emails still get answered by familiar names.
Since they're not the cheapest, I throw my experimental projects up on DreamHost, but my mission critical stuff is on FutureQuest.
There are many decent alternatives. From the above, I have used all but Google and Cloudflare. My experience has been pleasant with all that I have used.
I've been very happy with Google's registrar service... the only down side is you cannot bulk edit contacts. The couple times I've needed support they've been available within a couple minutes (once by phone, twice in browser chat). Not like any other Google support issue. Some prices are a little more than GoDaddy, others a little less, that part was pretty much a wash.
The biggest advantage over Google's registrar service, is there's no upsell, at least not that I noticed. They do offer some integrated service options. The included google dns hosting and mail forwarding services are great imho. It could use some slight improvements in UI/UX, but still better than any other registrar I've tried by a large margin.
Mileage may vary, of course, but I really do like the service overall. I'm not affiliated with Google, don't always like everything they do, and do have some reservations about them as a company. That said, imho the best registrar option available.
Lol. Every company you listed gets blasted all the time here on HN.
I normally don't like qoutes but i think the Batman one fits well here with how people perceive companies: 'You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain'
It seems that from the start the point was to share novelty domains, i.e. letting other people make subdomains off your domain is the point, and the rest of it kind of grew out from there.
josh the webmaster at freedns is a really great guy. and they are very much into the golden rule philosophy. note also that it is trivial to change subdomains, and you can make your parent domain public, or private.
Their marketing is effective at convincing small business owners they're one of the best choices for hosting. That's pretty much the whole reason they're so successful.
