The downside is you have to be very careful when you sign up as to not forget to remove the $100 worth of junk they throw in your shopping cart, but a few months after you register you can then transfer your domain to another registrar so you don't have to renew at their ridiculous $30-$40 price tag.
The upside is you don't have to spam your Twitter followers.
Also the more expensive a domain name is, the less spammy domains you see. If domains were $1 all the time, there would hardly be any domains left since everyone would register anything they can think of. Adding a price point reduces the number of unused domains.
Then, you have to pay the "owner" of each TLD to be able to register .com, .me, .io, etc. It costs, for example, over $7.00 to Verisign each time Namecheap registers a .com unless they've arranged some other pricing. The bottom line is the $.98 promotion is quite a loss leader.
Or does this count as news?
I also have a Namecheap account. I am a happy customer. But this, in conjunction with their attempt at FB/Twitter anti-CISPA campaigned, left a bitter taste in my mouth.
They are purchasing a social media campaign by paying each twitter re-tweeter $(DOMAIN_PRICE_FOR_DOT_COM - 0.98), out of which of them will not claim their payment.
And I am simply recommending a good service, the one I use and like, to my followers. Without being strong-armed.
If only there were decent .com's and .net's still left ;-)
you nave to retweet
and
you have to follow namecheap
to qualify
my current registrar doesn't spam me, doesn't pester me to buy their XYZSD and never adds anything else in the cart and their interface is fairly clean and costs almost 1/2 for the .com.
That said, I wouldn't transfer my most important domains away from NearlyFreeSpeech.net to save a lowsy $6-7.
