Porkbun partners with Proton | Hacker News Reader

Porkbun partners with Proton

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107 pointsunadvised248994 comments

Given the controversy surrounding Proton's potential political leanings, this feels like a major misstep for a company that should prioritize neutrality. It makes me seriously question where Porkbun stands.

It's also really bad timing, given that Porkbun's website at the time of writing appears to have been hacked, and is serving an invalid certificate.

Do you have any more info on the invalid certificate?

All I could find was this reddit post - https://www.reddit.com/r/PorkBun/comments/1jash9f/porkbun_ha... Edit for clarification, Porkbun loads fine for me, saw nothing abnormal there.

I got served with an invalid certificate too, just for one hit, then the site loaded normally. Haven’t made a screenshot, but the certificate was issued by crewai dot com.

Haven’t heard of any controversial political leanings in Proton Mail.

Only controversy I remember was this incident where PM was compelled by govt to release IP address of one of its users — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40280689

>Given the controversy surrounding Proton's potential political leanings

??? Explain?

>It makes me seriously question where Porkbun stands.

It's a cross selling partnership. Porkbun is referring its customers to use proton for mail hosting instead of fastmail or whatever. I'm not sure how that implies alignment of politics.

I had to look it up,

the “controversy” is that the CEO of Proton used his official proton twitter account to be excited about the US government appointment of someone that is likely to pursue antitrust sanctions against Big Tech. Fast Forward to now, this is true against Microsoft. He was also amused at Big Tech CEOs kissing up to Trump due to this specific threat of their monopolistic nature.

The CEO removed their posts and the company reaffirmed that was not in line with the neutral stance.

Vicariously invested people act like anyone that finds something beneficial in this administration is supposed to be ostracized.

And that even if the CEO had posted this on a personal account, “accountability” is needed and should affect everything he is a part of and benefits from, in order to cause financial pain, I think forever? I’m not sure what people want or expect, it doesn't feel fleshed out

The CEO posted something, and then the official Proton account also followed up with a multi-post writeup of how democrats were all captured by big tech as if the appointed person in question wasn't a former tech lobbyist.

I don't think it should follow them forever, but for a company a lot of people are looking to to protect them against US government intrusion, picking this time specifically to @ mention Donald Trump and praise him appointing a big tech lobbyist and then have official company account defend him is certainly a bad look even if it mostly got deleted.

Things like email security and VPNs are 99% a business of "do you trust this company to defend you against a nation-state as best they can" and injecting themselves into what, for them, is international politics at very least shows questionable judgement.

If it was a post now about the action against Microsoft, sure. But preemptively praising someone's appointment feels very "kissing the ring" in a way that I don't want my trusted security company to be doing.

to quote the CEO:

Second, regarding the message that was mistakenly posted from Proton's Reddit account, that message was not approved to be posted. I was unaware that it was posted, and I asked for it to be removed as soon as I saw it. We apologize for this failure in internal controls.

So, I think that's referring to a different message though. Most of what I referred to was from the official Mastodon account: https://archive.ph/LlbSj

Either way, it wouldn't have been much better if he'd personally posted the things the official account posted, or if the official account had posted that political rant with a "A response from our CEO:" at the top. Endorsing specific governmental actions would be something I could be fine with them doing, but calling out specific parties and candidates just feels like poor judgement.

People have been recommending porkbun here hard, but I tried them based on that and the site crashed (503!) when I had symbols in my password!

This wouldn't surprise me, given their engineering abilities, and I'd be terrified to leave anything critical in their hands.

I use them for all my domains, albeit with a passkey for my account. My domains are bought 10 years into the future though, so I rarely login.

I tried finding a reason to use Porkbun over something like namecheap and I couldn't.

The porkbun UI is just barebones, it isn't better than anything else.

Porkbun's prices are equal to or higher than most registrars.

I don't see configuration options in porkbun that I can't utilize with other registrars/dns hosts.

It seems like maybe porkbun has good customer service? I've had that elsewhere though, so again not a huge benefit for me. Support for domains isn't something I've ever really needed though.

I don't really understand why people are recommending porkbun like they are.

I use Namecheap for most of my domains, it quite sucks. I will admit that the DDNS functionality is nice (even supported by ddclient out of the box, if you ever need that), the selection of domains and everything else is as you'd expect, but the UI feels really clunky and is almost always slow for me.

I did briefly use Porkbun and have to say that the minimalist UI that actually loads fast was a breath of fresh air and was so much less frustrating than Namecheap. I wonder what other good options for domains are out there. No comment on customer service in either case, though.

Just buy domain on namecheap and move DNS somewhere else. Most server providers have good free ones or even cloudflare. Problem solved.

I've never used namecheap for anything except setting nameservers. I don't see why you'd use a registrar for anything else.

I might not want to run my own DNS servers. I might also not want to set them to ones provided by just a single VPS provider for my use case. I've migrated between DigitalOcean, Scaleway, Hetzner, Time4VPS and Contabo in the past and I don't want to have my domains be tied to any one of them, much like I might not always want to have Cloudflare in the mix.

For example, recently I migrated from Time4VPS to Contabo due to better prices and more RAM (I realized that most of the time my servers are near-idle, so some overprovisioning is perfectly fine as long as it leads to money savings), I could just change the A records for specific servers in NameCheap and the CNAME records that point to those for the actual apps picked up on that and it was a pretty trivial migration. Having the NameCheap DNS UI not suck would have made that even more pleasant, vs it being kind of slow and clunky.

That move saved me somewhere between 400-800 EUR a year, which with the salaries here is pretty good!

Porkbun is cheaper than Namecheap by a few dollars especially on renewals. Namecheap’s renewal price is semi-hidden/obscured.

All my domains are with Namecheap except 1-2 I was/am testing on Porkbun but I’m considering a switch since it means a hundred or two dollars a year in savings.

Porkbun is $11/yr for .com. Namecheap is the same standard price but namecheap regularly has $6/yr sales. .coms are $6.50 on namecheap right now vs $11 on porkbun.

which part of "cheaper on renewals" do you not get

Renewal is all that matters.

Namecheap is $14.95 renewal for me (I believe this is slightly discounted due to how many domains I have)

Porkbun is $11.06

That may not seem like much but it’s a couple hundred dollars a year difference for me (some TLDs have a bigger spread).

Visited Namecheap and currently registration is $10 (normal being $15) and renewal is $17 (wtf). The $6.5 is a promotional offer for one single registration. Porkbun is $11 all. So, yes, you get first year cheaper, but by third year Porkbun will be 3/4 the costs.

FWIW I find https://tldes.com pretty useful for keeping an eye on who is currently offering the best renewal for various TLDs I use.

Avoiding Porkbun because of politics and going to... Namecheap?!

They suspended all Russian accounts because of politics. This means they use the emotional rather than logical part of their brain and have no place anywhere near critical infrastructure. Full stop.

Pretty funny seeing this downvoted.

You might like it when somebody gives two fingers to those damn Russians, but their decision to drop all clients regardless of their political leanings or actions did absolutely nothing to damage the regime, while creating significant problems for projects like OVDinfo that already had their hands full providing legal help to antiwar protesters:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30504812

Not to mention that most clients moved to Russian registrars instead, this helping to keep more money inside the country.

FUCK namecheap. Their name says it all. If you're still using them, pray you won't run against their politics sooner or later. It's unpredictable, stranger things have happened in the last few years.

where did i mention politics? stop reading what you want to read.

Namecheap is sketchy, I feel like they’re always trying to trick me out of my money on renewals

I prefer Gandi.

I sworn by Gandi since the early '00s, but they sold themselves to a private equity firm recently and things almost immediately went just as one might fear.

Leave while you can.

> Leave while you can.

Why? Would anything happen to my renewed domains?

I know they no longer support free e-mail service, however, which was a bummer.

I have not found a better alternative.

I never had an issue with Gandi so far.

They’ve cranked up the fees for renewals. New registrations of .com domains are €11 whereas renewals are €32. Some long-tail TLDs are much much more.

When you have as many domains (i.e. amazing future business opportunities!) as I do, that adds up to a lot.

So one by one I’m moving them all to Porkbun. Seems great so far.

I can imagine it doesn’t matter so much if you don’t have many domains.

Yeah, only have three domains.

>Given the controversy surrounding Proton's potential political leanings

Define the controversy and their leanings

The CEO praised one of Trump's picks for an attorney overseeing internet regulation and then when asked about it, the official Proton account replied with multiple posts about how Democrats were sold out to big business and Republicans were the party of small business. Also about how J.D. Vance was the only person to want to talk to Proton about internet regulation. It's worth noting they also left out that the attorney in question lobbied for multiple big tech companies before being appointed and Proton's whole argument was "democrats are captured by big tech".

Then when further asked about it, the CEO essentially said he didn't actually know much about the situation and hadn't meant it as an endorsement despite the original posts essentially being a one-sided attack on Democrats and all praise for the current administration, including @ mentioning Donald Trump. He also kept saying "my comments from last year" when they were from December and the controversy was in Jan.

At best it seems quite naive from Proton's side to think the administration where Musk, Zuckerberg, and Cook were front row at the inauguration, and was generally funded by Musk, Thiel, Bezos and a raft of other VC folks is going to be more aggressive at regulating big tech companies and for internet privacy in general. At worst, they're trying to curry favor with/actually in favor of the current administration and don't want to admit it because a lot of their value as a business is for people who don't want the government to see their data.

damn that's extremely disappointing. I use Proton Mail, VPN and Drive and pay quite a bit of money for it.

Proton is a Swiss company why the fuck is the CEO glazing an american fascist. Time to look for alternatives.

Early on, the CEO, owner, of proton, ran a self published glam campain for himself,company, and family.So it's easy to see him attempt to do a little , heh heh ;), social mountain climbing.

And as a user (less and less) of proton,it's been a slog,with technical problems on an android phone, impossible to resolve, years, multiple different phones, browsers....it's on there end, and there technical support , engages, but does nothing. And the pokbun does not load.

are you aware of good alternatives?

i was thinking tuta.com but did not do proper research yet.

Having personal/business web space with domain email is reasonable, and the lowest tier prices are very cost effective,simple to use, with clutter free, intuitive UI. Having a domain free's up any possible liability from switching service or hardware providers and also means that anything you build, or pay to have built is your own intellectual property.Tech support tends to be good, as long as the problems are actualy technical, and you can provide relevant details, but the learning curve is steep, and nothing is intuitive on the back end, though it's worth it all, for the " IT WORKED!!, Heeeeeyyyyyy! I'm soooo Cool! " moment.

fastmail is awesome

That's really the core of it for me. Literally no one was asking for or expecting his input on the appointment of an assistant attorney at the US DoJ. Trump probably doesn't even know who this is or what their job is. The fact that Proton's CEO decided to talk about it is most of the attention this appointment even got.

Even outside of me thinking it was a poorly thought out endorsement, it's just so amazingly unnecessary. I follow journalists and activists around anti-trust and internet regulation and I literally hadn't heard about this appointment.

Here is a news article: https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-tru...

It's just American political posturing and cancel culture. It's really annoying how pervasive black-and-white thinking is now in American political discourse that you cannot even say one good or bad thing about some American politician or policy, without every American jumping on you like you have a chosen a side you should be ready to die for!

The spillover of American politics to the internet is the saddest thing I've encountered online as a non-American because they are trying to force us into right- and left- echo chambers they've created to make us think about politics like them.

Please don't fall for this trap of "us vs them".

This isn't just an American issue.

I'm not an American and I don't want to trust my email to a company that supports a government that is threatening to annex my country.

This isn't culture war stuff it's just common sense. I didn't fall for some us vs them trap, the current US government is frequently and loudly telling me that it's me vs them.

Like I said, black-and-white thinking - some company CEO supporting some particular public policy of an administration doesn't make them a part of "their" camp and hence your "enemy". I support the end of the genocide in Gaza and the war in Ukraine, and am happy that Trump as the US President wants to do so too (for his own political reasons, and in his own idiotic political ways). That doesn't make me a Trump MAGA fan or a right-wing supporter of the Republican.

I agree totally with you that it is black and white thinking -- either you're with us or you're against us.

Canada's sovereignty is not up for debate and we will not support a country that threatens us.

This means that we're not going to be buying nearly as many American goods, not going to be visiting America for tourism and not suffering the fools that you call politicians and diplomats.

As far as the average Canadian is concerned America can twist in the wind. The feelings of betrayal are real and won't be going away any time soon.

The world is tired of the inane histrionics and is moving on from America.

I’m not sure if Porkbun still do it, but for a while they were also pushing those decentralized blockchain TLDs alongside the real ones, which feels a bit disingenuous.

only really 'controversial' if yiu are a far left zealot. Everyone else is totally fine with it.

Porkbun is owned by republicans, so this alliance makes sense. People who don't want their money going to republicans will look elsewhere.

Do you have a source for this? I've been thinking of moving my domain names from Porkbun to an EEA company, but this would cinch the need to do that

Looks made up to me. No republican can post this without losing their minds.

https://xcancel.com/Porkbun/status/1803880640732926406

You realize there are a large number of LGBT Republicans, right?

Were. You'll still find some just because of bell curves and population size, but log cabin republicans and their ilk are dead as a doornail now,

I've been using Porkbun for my meme domains ever since I left the train-wreck that NetSol had become. broken back-ends, inability to update root server glue records, nobody left that knows the back-end, nobody left that understands how to use dig, etc... I split up my domains into multiple registrars based on category to avoid all the eggs in one basket rotting via cancel culture.

Porkbun are one of the few registrars that support IP restrictions on accounts so I can avoid pseudo 2FA SMS or propriety 2FA apps and they have a simple UI. I have no use for Proton however. If I want to send secure email I use PGP in Thunderbird and if I want more security then I use PGP with my own self hosted email servers. I consider PGP real E2EE for the email body vs. servers that have pseudo E2EE by managing the certs using code they have control over. If I want true E2EE for the entire file or message contents then I use self hosted SFTP with encrypted headerless random ciper+hash loopback images.

    cryptsetup benchmark

Then I randomly pick one of the three slowest ciphers and hashes along with a 222 to 499 random character strings and use an obscure filesystem on top of it. Multiple of these can be nested each using a different cipher+hash+long pw. There are additional techniques that dork up commercial forensics tools.

I am not seeing the hacked page or bad certificate but your comment was from 18 hours ago as of the time of my comment so they must have resolved it. [1] I hope they release a detailed write-up on the incident.

[1] - https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=porkbun.com&l...

What is the essence of this partnership? I never heard about porkbun, but I see it's a domain registrar, so I suppose the point is that now they offer a custom domain for your proton email... but it was always possible to attach a custom domain to proton email (if you pay for it, naturally). So, in what sense they are partnering? Like, it's now cheaper to do with porkbun + proton than porkbun + anything else, or proton + anything else? Basically, is it just some sort of meaningless marketing announcement, or is there more substance?

It seems that it just allows easy addition of proton email to your domains, at a slightly better rate.

Looks just like an advertisement to me, I'd downvote it if I could.

Looks like going for namecheap features but partnering with cool providers. Not sure why you would down vote, esp since 1/3 of frontpage here at any given moments is ads.

I presume you can avoid having to use porkbun’s zone management stuff and they just make it work behind the scenes.

Porkbun is a great domain register, and proton seems to be good in it's field. This is a cool and welcome colab for me

I decided to try Porkbun last week, had a minor issue and opened up a support chat. Instantly I was connected with a guy named Richard who I could tell was a real person, who had deep knowledge of domains and DNS, and he was empowered to solve my issue. I was blown away. I haven’t had support like that in years.

The best part of Google domains being purchased by square space was finding porkbun. I’ve moved all my domains and have been very happy.

And will they ever support an easily-configured catch-all domain, like Namecheap?

I have used porkbun for all of my domains for a very very long time. They are absolutely top notch. just like bunny CDN.

same here been using pork for almost 5 years now. Btw did you ever faced issue with redirection ?

I have to admit that I have never heard of Porkbun until right now, but I have been using Protonmail as my primary email since 2018 and I've been mostly happy with it. I think their Android app is terrible (or at least it was in 2023), but the iPhone app is fine and their web interface is fine too.

Regardless, I'm glad that they're getting enough recognition to be integrated with other services directly.

Porkbun is a great registrar. Cheap, decent UI, no bullshit.

Agreed. They support ALIAS records in their DNS, which many registrars don't.

Agreed. I'm switching all my domains over from NameSilo this year as they expire. Their shitty UI was one thing, but they jacked up their .com prices a lot, and I'm done with them.

You don't have to wait until expiry. Transfers generally add 1 year of service (for most TLDs), so unless you're already at the limit, you can transfer everything now.

in fact you should not wait till expiration. Some registries refuse transfers if the domain is too close to expiration.

This is the motivation I need to finally switch off NameSilo too

.com price looks decent too, only 62¢ higher than Cloudflare.

I've settled on Cloudflare + internetbs.net for the cheapest domains with no bs.

I searched for an obscure domain on pork bun. It was open. The very next day it was bought and up for sale for a higher price on some marketplace they own. They’re the same as any other registrar.

> I searched for an obscure domain on pork bun. It was open. The very next day it was bought and up for sale for a higher price on some marketplace they own. They’re the same as any other registrar.

For a counter anecdote: none of the potential domains names I kept tabs on for an organization had that happen, and it was nearly 6 months of regular checking before pulling the trigger.

That's not a counter anecdote. Both things can happen in the same world without invalidating each other.

I am still kinda on the fence if I should move to Proton or not. I bought a subscription on a sale, but I basically don't use any paid features, because they all are sort of vendor lock-in, in a sense I cannot realistically stop paying if I use them, I can mostly do just fine without using them, and it doesn't sound like a real complaint except that "regular" price is just horribly expensive for what I get IMO. The main sales point, of course, is that unlike Google the don't (and allegedly can't) read your emails, but when a service this expensive cannot really compete with a free gmail account feature-wise, and you aren't involved in Al-Qaeda or anything, it makes you reconsider.

(And, BTW, if you are involved in Al-Qaeda, i.e. if you are really truly concerned about anyone reading your emails, it's not like you can just rely on Proton and relax. Both because your recipients likely don't use Proton, and also because the more serious you are about such concerns, the more emphasis is on that "allegedly" word. So I'm still not sure what I'm buying.)

I wanted to de-Google, and initially I was using Kolab Now for about two years, and that was terrible, so I was looking for something to replace it, and someone told me about Proton. I have custom domains mapped to it, so if they piss me off enough I could migrate to another service easily enough.

I like having slightly increased security, but I'm not delusional: if I were doing something that I was worried about the government seeing, I probably wouldn't trust any cloud service blindly.

I got in early enough to where they gave me a boatload of storage, a bit more than a terabyte, so that's kind of nice to have as a backup for my photos and the like.

I have been quite happy with Porkbun. But I also was aware of Proton’s CEO and Proton the company’s vocal far right endorsements which didn’t matter much as I had written Proton off multiple times even before that for various reasons. Now, I am really not sure how to react to this Proton+Porkbun relationship thingie.

What are alternatives to Porkbun in cost and UX simplicity?

Don't let manufactured controversy give you analysis paralysis. These endorsements you speak of were a branding identity cock-up, nothing more. The leadership of most businesdes are covertly supportive of oligarchal stooges of any color. It just doesn't usually escape the filter.

They are Americans. No, thank you.

I'm afraid I have some unfortunate news for you about this forum we're using.

Are you paying money for this forum?

No, though contributions to a company can come in many shapes and sizes besides just direct financial transactions.

And that doesn't mean I don't already pay money to American companies every day of my life anyway ;)

I used to work down the hall from Porkbun in a co-working space in Portland. They gave me a nice cozy hoodie for doing a bit of A/B testing for them.

Nice folks!

But how is this not just an ad?

Not trying to demean you or them but, most people get paid actual money for doing a day or more of work

It was 15 minutes’ worth of work.

We were chatting about our different companies in the kitchenette, and I guess I mentioned some familiarity with DNS configuration.

A few days later, a guy from Porkbun knocked on our office door and asked if I had a few minutes. And I did!

Speaking of email hosting option, I think I am paying too much ($8/month) for the Google business suite with a custom domain. Is there any alternative out there that is cheaper?

I've been using Proton for a long time and Porkbun for a year.

I am not sure what I can get from that. Do I have to cancel my proton to move everything to the PB plan? Can I link my accounts?

I guess I am bookmarking this post to remind me to look at this when I have time...

Looks like it's just discounts on Proton's plans for Porkbun's customers.

Which is good enough for me, as a user of both I'll probably take this as an opportunity to finally upgrade my Proton plan.

If only the 'Lite' plan allowed infinite aliases on custom domains, I really wish it wasn't gated behind 'Pro'.

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