Name.com has always been more professional with less trick billing stunts. Easy to reach a human and they're not set on upselling you into garbage. However, if you aren't monitoring your inbox for expiration notices, you're already in trouble.

You can also just turn auto-renewal on Namecheap and put some money in there. I don't check the email where the notices are sent. And I have a lot of domain names I bought on a whim but may not renew. I'll set the important ones on auto-renew, but not the minor ones.

For something as important as this you might as well get multiple different alerts. Including custom made alert, right now you can already create one for when the domain will expire since you should know about it

I would suggest to add some money into the account if you are not going to monitor the emails. I have a lot of domains with Namecheap and I've always for plenty of reminder mails from them about expiry.

For me, it looks like the problem is between the keyboard and the chair and not otherwise. Fix the emails and avoid future issues. Namecheap has been one of the best domain providers period.

I have had plenty of bad experiences and predatory and opportunistic billing with plenty of others.

I have been dealing with domains since the early network solutions days (I would comfortably say that it my experience is close to 30+ years and Namecheap as a domain provider is at the top of my list!).

What were these "various factors"? You get warnings before it even expires.

I've had good interactions with gandi.net -- they sent me a reminder ~3 months in advance to the email on file last time a domain was set to expire.

AFAIK, the most popular service that people use for this is Markmonitor.

> The biggest issue is with expired domains they park it to a web page that advertises other people. Would like to avoid that.

Even if you find a registrar that claims not to do that. Nothing is stopping another company (such as a competitor) from grabbing the domain once it expires and pointing it at whatever they want.

FWIW: I've been a Gandi user for ~15 years so they're really the only ones I can recommend. I'd avoid GoDaddy.