Possibly it would make more sense to ask on the 196 community based on the company’s energy.

Anyway, I was browsing EURid’s list of registrars, and this company’s logo took my attention. However, I can’t find any experiences online.

I’ve checked through their websites, and so far my feelings are a bit mixed. Although most of it is just outdated or somewhat inconsistent bits across their websites.

Things that make me unsure

First and least important is info about one of the people behind the company, “Alfie”. Links on the about page are just completely outdated and dead. Website link in docs is at least alive, but also outdated, as can be seen by navigating in manner of URL in docs -> keybase -> GitHub -> newer website.

Second, the “Email us” button on the contact page redirects to a contact form, which really contradicts the text below:

If you want to send us a PGP encrypted email, please use the below key. Remember to attach your own key (as application/pgp-keys), so we can encrypt our reply to you.

That sounded so cool when I’ve seen it, but what e-mail address?
The contact form is on a “support” subdomain of their other website. This seems to be centered around the contact form, but there is also a “Manage PGP keys” button which redirects to a login page.
Maybe they migrated to that?
But then going to contact page on the domain’s second level does show an email, as well as linking to the same contact form.

Third, in the list of services, there’s also “Email”… which presents a self-signed certificate. Ignoring that, there’s just an “Unknown URL” error page.

We’re probably not responsible for this domain.

Lastly, and most importantly, right on ther main page it says:

Proxy registration for .eu

And that’s the only mention of that feature. But what is it? If following ICANN’s definition…

Proxy Services – Proxy services allow a domain name to keep certain identity and contact details from appearing in public Whois information. The proxy service becomes the registered name holder of record, and its identity and contact information is displayed in Whois data.

…it might be a problem. Because, let’s take a look at T&C of EURid (PDF):

Throughout the Term of your Domain Name registration, you must: […] b. keep your registration data accurate, complete and up-to-date at all times. Your registration data must be your own data and must not be that of your Registrar, or of a proxy holder or a representative of a natural person or legal entity who does not meet the eligibility criteria. […]

There’s also an annoying requirement for tax reasons, but that’s not their fault:

In short things are about to get a lot more complicated. We will need to collect at least two pieces of non contradictory evidence about which country you’re resident in, so we can pay the correct tax authority.

And what caught my attention (in a good way)

As I’ve said, I checked them based on their logo. That’s not a usual company logo.

Pricing for .eu TLD is OK.

Their ToS is short.

One button on bottom says “there’s no ai here!”.

Looking at the about page, this seems to be a small company operated by 2 people.

Looking at their mailing list archive, they’ve used to have a VPS service, gave shutdown information in advance (though less than 2 months), and set-up a migration route with another provider.
They’ve also informed about a security incident at one of their registries.

WHOIS privacy includes email forwarding from a funny domain name:

If you do not select it we will generate an anonymous @owowhosth.is email and publish that instead.

On their Mastodon, they describe themselves with

On a mission to make interneting a little easier, join us at http://glauca.digital/. Possibly anarchist, definitely antifascist.

Oh, and speaking of Mastodon, that is listed as one of their services. Based on this disclaimer…

MOBILE APP USERS: if you’re trying to sign up with a mobile app go back and select login to authenticate with our SSO.

…it does indeed sound like being their customer includes account on their Mastodon instance. Pretty cool if true.

Also, try whois with their ASN:

aut-num:        AS207960
as-name:        AS-TRANSRIGHTS
descr:          Trans Rights! Hell Yeah!
[...]
remarks:        ----------------------------
remarks:        Hmmmmm tasty routing policies...
remarks:        ----------------------------
        • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          2 hours ago

          OK, now I am even more interested. dig doesn’t return an A record:

          $ dig glauca.digital a
          
          ; <<>> DiG 9.20.27 <<>> glauca.digital a
          ;; global options: +cmd
          ;; Got answer:
          ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 11516
          ;; flags: qr rd ra ad; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 1
          
          ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
          ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 1232
          ;; QUESTION SECTION:
          ;glauca.digital.                        IN      A
          
          ;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
          glauca.digital.         3600    IN      SOA     ns1.as207960.net. 2bd17d47fafc43aa9be298a1cdfbd0ee.dns.glauca.digital. 1791925047 86400 3600 86400 3600
          

          Somehow, it does work in a browser. I tried different DNS servers as well (including NextDNS which I use in a browser), none returns an A record (or AAAA). So, naturally, I am curios what IP the browser uses. Since it clearly works, I tried ping just so that I could see the resulting IP, and figure out where it’s coming from.

          $ ping glauca.digital
          ping: glauca.digital: No address associated with hostname
          

          Great. That makes absolutely no sense at all. Where is Firefox getting the information from?
          So I went to about:networking DNS tab. The address field is empty. I am just typing this as I test. It’s just cache in my browser.

          I guess that would answer on reliability question. At least their nameservers still resolve to IP.