One thing to consider is that the way registrars work is fundamentally different of other businesses (since you mention Cloudflare incidents), because of their obligations to registries and the ICANN. A registrar cannot simply disappear, and your domains with it, that’s not possible. Domains are actually registered to a registry, and registrars have an obligation to submit their domain portfolio to a data escrow[1] to allow for handover to another registrar in case of bankruptcy.

Domain names can also be transferred to another registrar at any time[2] for the cost of a renewal. I’m not sure what your beef is with Gandi but you can transfer at any time if you’re not satisfied with their service.

My advice: rent reputable gTLDs (com, net, org, info, dev for instance), avoid ccTLDs from countries you’re not a resident of (ccTLDs are the 2 characters TLDs), use a big name registrar (I would recommend Namecheap), and keep your domain registrations separate from your hosting (you don’t want to mix up domain name disputes with anything else if it happens)

[1]: for gTLDs since it’s part of ICANN rules, which ccTLDs are not a part of, but reliable ccTLDs offer the same guarantees

[2]: unless you maxed out the renewal period (usually 10 years). A transfer triggers a renewal, so if your domain name is already registered for 10 years, you must wait a year before transferring. That’s why I always recommend to not renew for the max period and to always keep 2 years as buffer (ie. renew for 8 years at most)

very thoughtful response, thank you.

I've used a bunch, but Namecheap is the easy go-to for me today. Their support is extremely good. In over ten years, we've never had an issue that we couldn't solve over chat in 15 minutes.

i see they provide WHOIS privacy for free, great! i'm worried about exposing my personal information on the internet.

do people really put their personal address there?

WHOIS privacy is actually mandatory and has been for years, it should be free on any registrar, otherwise you’re being scammed.

You have to provide real data when registering your domain name for KYC purposes (if you lie your domain could get suspended) but it won’t be exposed anywhere anymore unless you opt in to make it public.

Some of my domains were on eNom and they were decent despite a clunky old web interface, but then they moved those domains to a VM reseller without even telling me why. Some are on Porkbun and they are decent. I have some spread across many other registrars. They are all getting worse every 5 to 10 years.

I suspect they will soon all be gone, replaced by investment companies that retain next to zero technical people. The nutter in me suspects there may be some goal to move everyone to big centralized platforms like Cloudflare and Amazon and at some point non-business accounts may lose the ability to update root DNS glue records. I think the goal is to centralize all DNS management and visibility. No idea what the actual long term goal is.

I use cloudflare and it's great. It feels like the only registrar that has a business case for at cost domains. Also if you're worried about cloudflare downtime, you can only use them for dns resolution (which hasn't been impacted) and not for proxying.

Most of my domains are at PairDomains (no nonsense UI, but also limited TLDs). Have become a recent convert to Porkbun after Godaddy blew a renewal (on a TLD Pair doesn’t support).

Porkbun. Been using them for years and I'm fairly happy with them.