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Porkbun is a U.S. based domain name registrar that has one guiding principle: operate on the thinnest profit margin possible, without gimmicks or loss-leading sales, and give the customer the lowest price for their domain name along with industry-standard basic features.
SpecsUpdate
Pros
Pro Transparent, everyday pricing for all domains and services
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.
Pro Free WHOIS Privacy (for top-level domains that allow it)
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.
Pro Not spamming you with useless offers
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!
Pro Free SSL Certificates
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.
Pro Free DNS hosting
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).
Pro Free e-mail forwarding and reasonable e-mail hosting
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.
Pro DNSSEC support for all top-level domains
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.
Pro Sincere, personal touch to all interactions
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.
Pro Free website builder and hosting at Weebly
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.
Cons
Recommendations
Comments
Flagged Pros + Cons
Pro cheap domain
this is the best place to purchase cheap .com domains. you get free whois, DNSSEC, interface is better.
Con Account management interface is dated and largely unlabelled
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.