Porkbun vs PolarisMail

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.

No hidden renewal charges and free privacy on all domains.

During support hours a real human can be reached via phone or email. Emails are generally responded quickly and always within 24 hours.

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!

Nothing wrong to say about them, this company should stay as they are.

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.

They accept Bitcoin as a form of payment for all services.

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.

At $1/month for a 25GiB mailbox and 5GiB of cloud storage, $2.90/month for 50GiB/15GiB of each, and $6/month for a 25GiB ExchangeMail account, that's about half of what you can see for those service levels from Google, Microsoft and Fastmail. Considering the uptime numbers are above industry averages and they don't skimp on security either, that represents some of the best value in the market.

If you have multiple people responsible for answering e-mail sent to one address, say for customer support purposes or such, you can share folders between accounts to accommodate precisely that use case.

All mailboxes can be setup to use two-factor authentication using a TOTP-based application like Authy, Duo or 1Password. Separately, the Admin Panel features can also be setup to require two factor authentication which is independent of the mailboxes, which adds an extra level of security for the accounts.

There are no limits on the number of aliases you can create for any mailbox, that includes wildcard or catch-all aliases and cross-domain aliases for other domain names you own.

For those that still like to access their e-mail using a bona fide client application like Thunderbird, Outlook or eM Client, there's no limit to the access provided via the standard POP3/IMAP4 servers for incoming mail and a workable limit of 35 e-mails per day sent over the SMTP server, which can be increased by written request. The Autodiscovery feature is still a bit hit-or-miss, so don't be surprised if you have to configure the client with the actual server addresses and ports yourself.

You can attach large files to your e-mails without a problem, so long as none are larger than 50MiB individually. For files larger than that, it's pretty easy to use the cloud storage to host the file and generate a link to share with someone via e-mail for them to get access to it.

From the webmail interface to the groupware, support wiki and company website, there is not a single advertisement to be seen anywhere, on any of them. Their absence is actually pretty jarring if you're used to using the Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo! webmails, just to name a few. Their portals load fast because of it.

The Admin Panel lets you select a value on a ten-point scale to determine how permissive or restrictive you want the spam filtering engine (in this case Rspamd, with SpamAssassin running as a secondary trap) to be on each account. It takes a bit of trial-and-error to find the correct number for each account, but works remarkably well after that, though some senders need to be whitelisted manually if they don't conform to good DMARC practices.

Most of the time you can handle this on your own since IMAP4 has been the de facto e-mail standard for so long, but some hosters don't implement it correctly and others like Google specifically mangle it to discourage you from leaving them. In the event you can't get it sorted on your own, Polaris will untangle it for you without a charge if you pay up for at least a year in advance.

If you host a lot of e-mail accounts with them, you may want to automate their management behind a CLI or REPL, or if you're getting into the e-mail reselling game then you'll want to map their control panel behind a branded one of your own. Luckily, access to their API is free and moderately well-documented, so all of that is limited only by your imagination.

It's easy to write rules to send messages that meet some criteria, say those from a certain e-mail address or domain, or those sent to one of the mailboxes aliases, to bypass the Inbox and be delivered directly to a specific mailbox folder or even just logged and deleted.

Automatic backups are made of your account (including deleted items) and stored for 30 days, in the event something happens to their equipment or you suddenly realize two weeks after the fact that the e-mail receipt you deleted without thinking is actually needed for something important. They can be restored at will from the Admin Panel, just be sure to export all of the e-mails you've received since then so you can reimport them one the backup restoration process has finished.