The smallest piece of johnie.eu's stack is the registrar that holds the domain. It is not an exciting choice, but it is still a legal and operational one. For a project built around an EU-first stack, I did not want to ignore it.
That registrar, for johnie.eu and most of the rest, is Inleed.
Inleed, briefly
Inleed is a Swedish hosting company based in Helsingborg. They handle domain registration, hosting, and the usual small-business stack. More importantly for me, they are the registrar behind johnie.eu and most of the rest of my domains.
Why over Namecheap or GoDaddy
Namecheap and GoDaddy both work. They are also US companies. For a .eu domain, I would rather keep the registrar relationship inside Europe too.
In rough order of how much they moved the needle:
- Jurisdiction lines up with the registry. A
.eu,.se,.nudomain registered through a Swedish registrar under Swedish and EU law is the cleanest version of this contract. No CLOUD Act wrapper around the registration, no US escalation path for a registry dispute, no third country in the chain. The argument is strongest when the registry itself is European; for the non-EU TLDs Inleed does carry, you still keep the registrar jurisdiction clean, which is worth doing on its own. - Support sits closer to the registry. If something odd happens with a transfer, an EPP code, or DNSSEC, the support path is simpler when the registrar lives in the same region.
- No upsell theatre at checkout. Inleed's domain page is a price, a year count, and a button. Domain privacy is included, no SSL upsell, no "premium DNS" tier, no dark-pattern auto-renew on a 36-month plan you didn't ask for. Anyone who has bought a domain from GoDaddy knows the page I'm describing.
What I do with it
Per domain, the workflow is short: search, register, point the NS records, leave. Across a portfolio, that adds up to a dashboard I actually want to use.
When Inleed doesn't have the TLD
The catalogue is good, but not complete. When Inleed does not carry the TLD I want, two other registrars cover the gaps.
Gandi is the first fallback. It is French, broad on TLD coverage, and has a real domain-management API.
Porkbun is the asterisk. It is US-based, but it is still useful for long-tail TLDs that neither Inleed nor Gandi carries at a sensible price.
There is no strict rule between Gandi and Porkbun. I pick the cleaner option TLD by TLD. Most of the portfolio still stays on the European side, which is the main point.
Trade-offs, honestly
- No first-party CDN or edge platform. Inleed sells hosting, but it isn't bunny.net and it isn't Cloudflare. If you want one vendor for both registrar and edge platform, this isn't it. (For me, splitting registrar and host is a feature; one less single point of failure.)
- No API for domain management. Inleed is dashboard-first, not automation-first.
- Pricing is honest, not the cheapest. You do not get bait pricing in year one, but you also do not get the cheapest first checkout page.
What I got
johnie.eu sits with a Swedish registrar under Swedish and EU law, and most of the rest of my domains do too. When Inleed has the TLD, it is the default. When it does not, Gandi usually gets the next look.