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Comment by tiffanyh | Hacker News Reader

$9.73 renewals at Porkbun.

Pricing like that makes me uncomfortable.

Even if they have a tiny margin on the domain costs, that means that they are probably a loss-making business. So they plan to just sell to Google, Amazon or Microsoft in the future, and we don't yet know which one of those it's going to be?

Even if they had a small margin, does that mean that there's poor quality support, despite domains being mission-critical to businesses?

Probably not google. They just sold google domains off

You're making me nostalgic for the first time they retired one of their chat offerings...

Selling headline products at or near break even and then making your margin on add ons is a fairly standard pricing strategy. Doesn't mean they plan to sell any time soon.

I do agree that having something so mission critical be managed by someone making practically nothing off of you is concerning, but I dont think that changes all that much at double their price. Either way the second something goes wrong, you leaving as a customer is much cheaper for them than it is for someone to spend any amount of time fixing your problem.

Unless you're markmonitor big then as far as I can tell the best bet is to just go off of general sentiment about domain providers. Or maybe have it through a cloud company if you're spending enough on other things to warrant proper tech support?

Those are great points. Agree with everything, except does Porkbun actually make a decent margin on any of their offerings? They all seem quite cheap, but it's possible that some of the hosting could be shared out to a ridiculous degree, so it might be a bit difficult to say for sure.

Google just sold it’s registrar business to Squarespace, so, maybe not.

One arm of Google has no idea what the other arm of Google is doing. Watch them re-enter domain registration within the next 5 years.

Just try to follow along with their chat developments if you don't believe me.

That's presumably going to increase on September 1 or else they'll be taking a $0.04 loss every time they sell a .com.

Which they might be willing to do, if the average domain generates enough upsell revenue with other services.

There is definitely an increase coming for Porkbun but it is still a tiny amount. I just moved four domains from Namecheap to Porkbun.

Yes, it's rising to $10.37.

Wow! Porkbun! I nearly forgot about that place!

Shamelessly been using Namecheap for a while now... their UI is a bit old school but they have some of the best prices around (at least did)

> their UI is a bit old school

This honestly is a (positive) feature IMO.

> This honestly is a (positive) feature IMO.

Personally, I rather like old school UIs, since the usability is pretty good!

That said, Namecheap's website has always felt a little bit on the slow side: every page navigation for me takes at least 2-3 seconds and that's on a pretty decent connection. Luckily I don't have to use it daily.

Overall, the prices and services that they offer seem decent to me. They are even supported well by local software like ddclient (dynamic DNS, if ever needed): https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx...

Except for their VPS hosting: there are more affordable and nicer options out there like Hetzner (as long as you can get an account) and perhaps Contabo (as long as you don't mind setup fees). Unless you want to have everything on as few platforms as possible, I guess.

Why's that? I've always found Namecheap's UI to be pretty bad - slow, inconsistent on mobile and takes several clicks to find the list of domains I actually own.

What about that is positive?

Sorry I meant that the oldish UI on PorkBun is a positive feature.

I moved ~10 domains from namecheap to porkbun awhile back, since they were already cheaper.

eh they too will increase prices over time as namecheap has; just a matter of time

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