The worst domain provider in history
When I bought this domain almost 2 years ago, I was broke. With that said, I still wanted a domain, so I started to look for the provider with the best deal. At that time, my current (as of March 2026, hopefully not anymore) big and seemingly reputable provider reg.ru offered a hell of a deal: the domain (physick.ru) + a FREE .online domain + a free SSL certificate for only $3/year. You can't tell me you wouldn't buy this the second you saw it. As you can tell by the existence of this article, this was a hell of a mistake. In the span of 2 years, one of which was not really by choice, they drove me so mad I decided to write a whole article about them. This is the first time I've gone out of my way to throw buckets full of crap at some company, and that's a huge achievement given the existence of mail.ru (a.k.a. vk.ru). In this article, I will try to recreate all the events in chronological order.
The great start
At the time I bought this domain, I didn't really have a good use for it. Before that, I used my father's domain to host stuff for my university. That had 2 disadvantages: I could not easily add DNS records, and it would dox me as it used my father's (and hence my own) surname. Needless to say, if I wanted to share my ultra epic website that I spent a whole evening writing CSS for (not to be confused with this website) with my online fellas, I would have to change the domain. This brings us to the events described in the intro—in May of 2024, I found this hell of a deal, paid my fee, and became a proud owner of my domain. I redirected it to my IPs, rewrote the NGINX config, and was generally happy with my little Django project. However, after finding out you could find my name in the files the app sends to the frontend, I deleted the registry and physick.ru became a beautiful default NGINX welcome page.
The first scam
And it was not the only time. For 3 months, they were silently taking my money for the "growth tariff" that I did not sign up for, was not notified I was signed up for, and most importantly, did absolutely nothing to my website. To this day, the purpose of this thing is a mystery to me. Of course, I disabled it immediately, but the money was spent. For the sake of argument, let's count the expenses. I spent 300 rubles for my 2 domains on terms that claimed I would get 2 domains and an SSL certificate. Then the provider stole (roughly) 1800 rubles for a subscription that I did not know about. This whole thing smells like a scam already, but this is just the tip of the iceberg.
IT WAS A FUCKING DOMAIN PROVIDER.
A year went by. I didn't really use my domain—all of my hosting needs were covered by other means. After the incident, I was strongly inclined to switch providers but didn't want to buy a domain for nothing again. I set my sights on a hosting provider called NetAngels (we used it at work) and waited patiently for the perfect moment to migrate. Then the day came.
The end of a first year
I met a guy online who was planning a neat local event. Not going deep into details, I decided to help him out and make a Twitch TTS system for him. It was not a hard task, but I needed to host it somehow. This was the moment I was waiting for. I created a NetAngels account, set up a migration, went to reg.ru... and they refused. According to their claims, I had to fill out a LETTER with all my personal information, send it to them, wait at least 3 business days, and then they would let me migrate after that. Keep in mind that the domain was unpaid for at the time and was redirecting to a "pay up or else" page. The fact that the event was on Monday and it was Friday didn't help the case. Sadly, at that point, I was heavily invested in the project, so I decided to stay with them for one more year. At the end of the day, it's only 300 rubles, even if they will take the .online domain...
As you can guess, it was not 300 rubles. Matter of fact, it was close to a thousand rubles and an order of magnitude higher for the .online domain. If I didn't urgently need a domain, I would never have agreed to this. This is not a high-demand domain. I was signing the contract with the terms that I would be put on a 300 rubles per year tariff. The amount of money I had to spend unwillingly was increased by 600 rubles, making a total of 2400 RUR.
The great certificate saga
It all started when I decided to make this website. After writing everything code-wise, it was time to deploy it. It's not a hard task, really. I have a host server and a proxy server running NGINX, so I would just have to handle TLS on the latter one. At this point, I remembered the promised SSL certificate, and to my surprise, they delivered. It was a neat GlobalSign cert signed up for 6 months, presented as a "free" option. I downloaded it, installed it, and everything was great until I decided to use a subdomain. At one point, I had to host a backend for a product demo on my machine, and as a logical step, I registered a new 2nd level DNS record. The issue arose when I tried to put it in the NGINX routing—the certificate was not wildcard. "Not a big deal," I thought, "the providers usually provide a Let's Encrypt certificate. I'll just use one." How naive I was. When I tried to look up a way to get one, I was greeted with this magnum opus:
That was written as an excuse for them not providing those services. Do I even have to say how batshit insane that is? I guarantee that 90% of their user base does not care about any of this. What's even worse is that a quick search reveals that they used to offer Let's Encrypt services but dropped them at some point. That is actually the reason I'm writing this. In a week, my GlobalSign certificate expires, and they suggested I extend it. As you might have guessed, the continuation of a free certificate would cost me 2,948 rubles. What's even funnier is that they wouldn't even ask me if I wanted to pay $37 if I hadn't unbound my bank card from their platform, which was my way to ensure they wouldn't fool me with their silent subscriptions again. Turns out it was a smart move.
So, what's the final result? I lost 2400 RUR to reg.ru's scummy practices, I almost lost 2950 RUR to the same thing, and I have no doubt they will try to fuck me over if I don't move. This is the first time a company has gone out of its way to participate in the most predatory and disgusting practices imaginable that I can remember. Words cannot describe how outraged and full of hatred this company makes me. And the worst part of it is that they keep shoving themselves down the throats of all the local developers. The amount of ads I get for these fellas is insane. Well, at least I know where all the money goes.
My final review: 0/10. Don't use.
Also while I was writing this they pushed a redesign getting rid of their signature blue design and cleaning up their older articles. Good thing I made a screenshot of the article I cited earlier. That text was taken from there. Good for them, now they have more visible distinction from netangels and that should help people avoid this disaster of a provider.