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Comment by alxmng | Hacker News Reader

Porkbun.com - domains at cost, all the TLDs, super nice people, great deals and newsletters, and free domain sale parking page.

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How are they making money with that? What’s the catch?

Porkbun sells .com, .net, and .org domains at cost, but adds small markups for other TLDs to earn their profit.

> We currently, and historically, have sold .com, .net, .org domains at cost. That means at the cost we pay the registry + fees we need to cover, such as regulatory taxes and card processing fees, without any profit for ourselves.

> When we mark up other, standard domains, typically the most we do so is $1 + those fees. We often do less than $1.

https://blog.porkbun.com/2021/06/23/how-much-does-a-domain-n...

CloudFlare also claim to sell .com at cost, their price is $8.57 per year. Porkbun's price is $9.03 per year (ignore first year promotion).

They must have different definitions for "at cost". Cloudflare charges the wholesale registry cost plus the ICANN fee. According to their blog post, Porkbun charges a price that would allow them to break even, which also includes regulatory taxes and payment processing fees. Since Cloudflare doesn't factor in these additional taxes and fees, they're losing a little bit of money for each domain they sell. I guess Cloudflare considers this a marketing expense to promote their CDN and other paid services.

Cloudflare is the least expensive registar, but they don't handle new domain registrations (only transfers and renewals), and they offer fewer TLDs than Porkbun. A combination of Cloudflare and Porkbun is the most cost-effective way to register domains in the long run, unless you're willing to deal with registrars that steeply discount only the first year.

I see, thanks for the info. Btw, Cloudflare do offer new registration now, though it's currently marked as "beta", maybe only certain accounts have access to it.

Thanks, this is good to know!

+1 for Porkbun. I used to use Namecheap until I had a couple of negative experiences with their customer support team. I then left for Porkbun (and Cloudflare for some domains) and never looked back. Porkbun is cheaper than Namecheap in the long term, and their website is really straightforward.

+1 to Porkbun. Their website is one the more minimal side, but it's been quite reliable for what I need (buy domains and edit DNS records). Their prices are low and transparent.

Another +1 for Porkbun. I usually use domcomp.com to compare prices and Porkbun is basically always in the top 3.

Porkbun is my go-to as well. I left Gandi several years ago after quality and UI speed deteriorated. As an aside, I've enjoyed the little bits of humor sprinkled into Porkbun's UI such as the "back end" being the pig's rear, and the nonsensical dejigamaflipper option :)

+1 for Porkbun. The site is clean/simple and they support WebAuthn with the ability to add multiple keys. They also have an extra password option for important domains which I set to my phone PIN so it isn't written down everywhere.

For DNS, I use Cloudflare for everything.

Big +1 for Porkbun. I feel a bit bad because I use them only for domain registrations, and then point out to Bunny DNS or Cloudflare DNS. I don't host websites or email with Porkbun either, mostly because moving existing setup from elsewhere is a pain.

The website was very Korea-themed, so at first I thought it was a Korean company.

However they must have different versions and detect your country based on IP address.

I also use Porkbun, but the first thing I do is forward DNS to DigitalOcean, since they have Terraform support.

I like the wide range of TLDs they have.

+1 for Porkbun. Nameservers are set to Cloudflare (not proxied) as I found them to be the sweet spot for speed of response and UX.

This and cloudflare, cause google domain's not available in our country.

+1 have had hundreds of domains with them, never an issue.

Not quite all TLDs. They don't have .lc for example.

Came to say this.

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