All the top-level domains available at Porkbun (319 of the 1,562 currently in existence) are offered for $1 above the wholesale price, plus the processing fee for your credit card. No gimmicks or bait-and-switch pricing, no surprises. That's the price for renewal and inbound transfers too, so you know exactly how much you'll be spending every year you own the domain.
All domains receive free WHOIS privacy, which masks your personal information from the public registry and saves you from the deluge of e-mail spam and telemarketers which typically accompanies purchasing a domain name today. Some top-level domains, like .us, require that you publish your contact info publicly, and they'll tell you that before you place the order.
No more topping up a reseller account with credits that cost a commission to buy or getting caught at renewal with a higher price unless you find a coupon somewhere... It's integrity all the way and a VERY fast payment portal!
Don't let the next big hack allow some internet pirate to steal your domain, just turn on 2FA in the control panel and all logins will require a TOTP code in addition to your e-mail address and password.
They are sincere, they do not spam your inbox with "offers" and services you are never going to use and then, if you make the mistake to accept, pay inflated prices when you renew. They communicate with you only for serious and legitimate reasons. Excellent services!
Every domain is issued SSL certificates for the root domain and any ten subdomains of your choice via the Let's Encrypt service. The certificates expire every 90 days but Porkbun automatically renews them for you prior to each expiration, for as long as you own the domain. These certificates don't offer any identity verification, but they do allow all the traffic to and from your domain to be encrypted at industry-standard levels at no cost. They can be acquired at will through the interface without any contact with support staff and the certificates are available for download as soon as they are created.
Registering the domain is only half the battle, the other half is announcing to the world the IP address of the server hosting your site. Porkbun includes this service with all domain registrations and makes it easy to manage by using the GoDaddy DomainConnect standard for service auto-discovery. This means you don't need to get your hands dirty, just pick the web host you want to connect the domain to from the drop-down menu and click OK. Or you can manage all the settings yourself from the control panel without restriction or interference. You can have as many A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, NS and TXT resource records as your heart desires (or ARIN allows).
All domains come with 10 free e-mail forwards which allow you to use your new domain to create aliases for existing e-mail accounts elsewhere. If you need hosted e-mail instead, that's only $24/year per mailbox, and it includes 10GB of storage, external POP3 and IMAP gateways and a modern webmail portal from which you can send and receive e-mails.
Worried about falling victim to one of the many security risks on the internet? Then take a moment to generate DS records for your domain and Porkbun will propagate them to the root zone for free. Doing this ensures that even if the nameserver for your site goes down, no hackers can impersonate it and steal your visitors' personal or financial information.
The support team is very pleasant to deal with and small enough that personal relationships can easily be formed. The promise of responses to support requests in under an hour is almost universally observed and even their site has some fun (who doesn't like pictures of playful piglets while their SSL certificates are generated?) instilled in it.
All domains at Porkbun can take advantage of Weebly's very popular website builder, complete with hosting for unlimited content pages and an e-commerce shop for five items. Of course many features are locked out until you pay for a hosting package, but you can very easily host a simple but professional looking portfolio or blog with minimal effort and greater than 99% uptime.
While all the features a person needs to manage their domain are present, the layout isn't very intuitive. Almost all major functions are represented by naked icons (no labels, only tooltips), leading to a higher-than-average learning curve. This shouldn't detract from the power of it once one has gained experience with it—once you know where things are, every action taken is executed instantaneously.
Namecheap support is available 24 hours a day, every day of the year. Their support is provided over live text chat, which has a lower barrier to entry, faster connection, and allows you to communicate easier than other the phone.
Because most of the support you need for domains require you to provide text configuration data, live online messaging is the most efficient way to get fast support. It also does not require your constant attention so you don't have to waste time while the operator is researching an answer for you.
When it comes to paying for domains, Namecheap supports all common payment methods. For most people this will be credit cards and Paypal, but Namecheap also has an option to add funds to your account separately.
Not all registrar care, but when there's an error or something held up the registration they've always at least gave it a shot without prompting. This is done in a proactive way, which isn't seen very often at all. This way the user can be hands off and not need to deal with certain issues as it is taken care of in the background by their support. User is still informed, of course, but can be entirely hands off, or not, but usually they've been efficient and transparent.
Through its NC.ME program, students can get a free 1-year registration on the .me TLD and discounts on .com, .io, and other TLDs along with Namecheap Private Email hosting.
At face value, Gandi's "no bs" marketing slogan and tone may be perceived as unprofessional, especially in the eyes of corporate or otherwise sensitive clients of yours.
Hover is reliable. But their days of being price competitive are past. There are better options out there. They've lost their customer focus in this regard. Taking advantage of existing customers with high renewals is poor practice in any business.
Hover has a no wait time policy for phone support, and get back to your emails in a very timely fashion. A test support email got a response in 10 minutes.
If you have established a payment profile on your account and wish to have automatic billing for your domains, they will attempt to renew the domains about 1 month before the expiration date. If the credit card has expired, they will notify you that there was a problem with your payment and that your card will need to be updated.
They have put some thought into their user interface. DNS changes, NS updates and registrar transfers are extremely simple with name.com. And the UI remained relatively unchanged for years.
POP sets you up in less than 60 seconds with everything you need to get a new idea or business online - the setup is quick and there is no credit card required.
To get immediate credibility for your idea, you can email potential customers/partners from your own custom email address, using your domain name. Most registrars charge for this, but the first address is free with POP. You have to use webmail (or you can upgrade to IMAP access for $1/mo), but as a free service, it's a great feature to help gain traction before adding costs to a budding idea!
Only email support available for free user. If something happens to your account or domain, you can send an email and have to wait 1-2 weeks to get an answer from a person.
You do not loose any paid fees from other registrars because the ICANN fees you pay to Cloudflare are put on top of existing balances. This means you can move your domain at any time without losing any pre-paid fees.
The registration is deeply integrated into the existing Cloudflare ecosystem. You basically do not have to leave Cloudflare's website to manage any part of your domain.
Several users reported that GoDaddy quickly registered domains they were searching before the user could do, so the company could sell the domain to them afterwards for a higher price.
The customer representatives confirm that there are only US servers. You still can use it in other parts of the world, but for a better connection you should definitely consider other options.