- No crazy upsells when buying a domain: GoDaddy is out - No bloated domain management UI: I’ve seen some terrible over-engineered JS heavy management UIs) - Prices in the cheaper side: I don’t need rock bottom prices, but I’d like to have competitively priced domains - Secure: must support MFA via OTP or YubiKey. Sadly iwantmyname doesn’t make the cut because they are still using Authy instead of OTP
Bonus would be a domain registrar with a CLI. I’d get payment and everything setup in a browser and check availability and make reservations in a CLI.
What are your top picks and recommendations?
No markup on pricing according to their docs. MFA with yubikey.
The have what looks like a read only API https://api.cloudflare.com/#registrar-domains-properties . The speed Cloudflare are moving they might expand on it as registrar only just become generally available.
UI is basic, no frills.
About a year ago I compared all of the top registrars by number of domains registered, for domain registration prices and feature pricing (like paying extra for whois privacy and ssl certs), and Dynadot just about tied with NameCheap, but I liked Dynadot's interface a lot better. Dynadot supports token-based MFA, free whois privacy, and free ssl certs. They also pass on the domain registration "tasting" period to the customer (if you purchase a domain name but change your mind in X hours, you can cancel and get your money back, in credits I think).
I like Google domains a lot. Has everything you are looking for. Looks like it's alpha in the gcloud tool
They also offer a cli for managing domains. https://cli.gandi.net