What is everyone's favoured domain name provider these days?

Namecheap have served me well, for both personal and work.
- Their price seems cheap, but they slowly hike up the price over time. Their API is so bad that it’s a classic example of what a company doesn’t reinvent themselves and sit on their reputation and status quo.
  
  Thankfully I don't deal with enough domains to need to wrangle them with an API.
  Appreciate the warning for if I ever I do though - what's so bad about it?
- Ditto on namecheap.
  I will say that while GoDaddy is awful for web hosting their VPS customer service is like a VIP queue, and they're great. Not the cheapest. I only keep GoDaddys shit webhosting because I have their VPS as well and I save a bit that way.
- I had a blog on my RPi and bought a domain on Namecheap. Years later the project died and cancel the renovation of the domain.
  Many months after, I self hosted some services and wanted to use the domain again. I tried to purchase it but Namecheap kept it as “security against losing the domain” but to recover it I was asked to pay much more that I paid before when using the service.
  Came with another name and bought it from cloudflare instead.
  
  Sounds like capitalism at work, pricing to suit demand :( Not a great idea to let a domain fall out of grace if there's ever a chance you'll want it again.
  In work we still maintain domains for arms of the parent company that are long defunct. Less for us and more to prevent others registering.
  I've had one personal domain go out of grace, but the reactivation price wasn't too bad. Cheeky, yes - but not bad enough to get something new.
  Could be worse, could end up at auction like hexbear did....
- This is what I moved to after Gandi started becoming shit and I have nothing bad to say about them yet.
- This has the most upvotes so far so checked it out first.
  I’m at the basket stage but don’t see an option to not add my details to the public database like I did on names.co.uk. Do you know if that’s an option.
  
  The private domain registration service Withheld for Privacy is available for almost all domains Namecheap offers. Due to registry restrictions, It cannot be used with .ca, .ch, .cn, .co.in, .co.uk, .com.au, .com.es, .com.sg, .de, .es, .eu, .fr, .gg, .id, .in, .is, .li, .me.uk, .net.au, .nl, .nom.es, .nu, .nyc, .org.es, .org.au, .org.uk, .paris, .sg, .to, .uk, .us, .vote, .voto, .xn--3ds443g domains.
  https://www.namecheap.com/security/domain-privacy-service/
  
  It's definitely a thing, but not for all domain types. Not sure why.

I've been using porkbun for a few years now and it's been cheap, simple, and easy to use.
- And now they're partnering with Proton!
  https://porkbun.com/products/proton_mail

PorkBun has been pretty great to me for years. Good prices, lots of TLDs, good support, and their site is pretty straight forward.

my long time fav is https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/
cheap, easy, functional. run by a bunch of linux geeks with the idea you only pay for what you use.
- This looks like they provide hosting services?
  I believe a domain name provider are the folk that sell domain names.
  
  they are both a registrar and host. i, for example host no sites with them. i only register domains here and use their dns.
  https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/domains
  
  These days, I don’t remember the last registrar I’ve seen that does not provide at least some kind of basic hosting. Maybe they want to grow like all businesses, maybe just being a registrar doesn’t keep the lights on anymore. Not sure, but it definitely seems to be the thing most, if not all, do now.

I've been using Cloudflare for my sites. They offer at-cost domain registration, and I've been pretty happy.
- I decided to go with Cloudflare. Thanks for the rec.

Porkbun and Cloudflare are the only one's I use anymore. Great service and unbeatable prices for both.

There are no more free domains anymore?
- There are, but the process may be truly arcane -- 1993 for the .us process found in RFC 1480 -- but people have done it: https://web.archive.org/web/20160316224838/https://owen.sj.ca.us/~rk/howto/articles/usdomain/usdomain.html

waffled between porkbun and spaceship before settling on the latter, but not sure if i made the right choice honestly lol

EasyDNS. They are on or the largest independent registrars and DNS providers. When you call or make a ticket, you get competent engineering support. They also work with Let’s encrypt via DNS rest api as well.

Ionos 1&1 with their infinite forwarding addresses and subdomains, free email inbox, and low starting cost (usually $1).

I have a domain with Njalla.
I ended up with them because they seem to take privacy very seriously.

Have had a lot of good years with gandi.net
- Until they were bought twice and royally fucked up everything that was good since the 2000s.