I used to have a really cheap domain from Namecheap before, and I used Cloudflare as my DNS. I'm going to buy a new domain, and Spaceship seems to be the cheapest registrar for my domain right now (I'm only buying for one year), however they seem really new. Are there any differences between Namecheap and Spaceship, and should I use one over the other?
Sorry to say I’ve never heard of spaceship, but wanted to make sure you know that Cloudflare now has a registrar service, so if you’re already using them for DNS, that might be worth a look for you.
Be careful of unknown registrars with lower than Cloudflare prices. This is because Cloudflare does not apply mark up on wholesale price, which means any registrar that undercuts Cloudflare’s pricing would most likely be doing it at a loss. $8 here, $8 there, with enough customers registering at that kind of discount, they’d go out of business, taking your domain with them without any warning.
If you really are that cash strapped, there’s always those free subdomain providers that you could use instead… last I checked, $0 is cheaper than $2.
I've preferred namecheap for years for their charity fundraising for the EFF and general no-nonsense takes on various Internet related political issues that have come up over the years.
It also helps that the service is also nice with a high quality UI, a generous number of DNS records, and I've never had issues with their DNS servers.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I am pretty sure that Spaceship is a new endeavor by Namecheap themselves. With this as reasoning I've seen people advise to keep a distance from Spaceship, because it's somewhat expected to have the same (bad) customer service.
I use namecheap for a ton of my domains, but I use them only as a registrar. All of my hosting is done on other providers (aws, digitalocean, linode, etc.).
This means I've got access to my hosts' machines via command line, and so can setup up certbot really easily. Though going with a self-managed host also means you'll need to have some technical proficiency to take care of things yourself. But to me, that's part of the fun.
So having used many, many registrars both personally and for businesses, I would recommend the first year on namecheap, get that cheap price, before final 60 days are up, migrate it to cloudflare; only pay $10 in this case and they extend your remaining time over on them so you don't lose out on any cost you already paid to previous registrar. It's a no brainer. You pay at cost for domains at Cloudflare, but no cheap introductory price.