[deanhills]

I've been using Freenom services since it came into being and, like you said, it never disappointed DNS propagation-wise. In the order of few minutes generally.

To my mind, as a TLD-manager that should be norm. This is why it's a bit unfair to compare Namecheap to it, which doesn't have -to my knowledge- any authority on any TLD of its own.

Thanks @fChk. Didn't think of it like that before. I assumed that since I was paying for a domain, that the expectancy would be for DNS to propagate faster than with a domain that was free. And now the penny drops. Thinking about it more logically. Of course! Authority makes a bigger difference or lack thereof rather than whether it's a paid or free domain. From that point of view I see your point the two can't be compared.