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Comment by nabbed | Hacker News Reader

>Either way, GoDaddy is not the first choice for a new domain in 2026.

Off the top of your head, what would be a decent one?

Porkbun. Their prices are very reasonable and their support team is consistently responsive and helpful. Honestly, even if their pricing was higher I would still choose to use them because it's clear their goal is to maintain a useful product, not infinite growth andendshittification

Interestingly, Cloudflare (don't shoot me for mentioning the name, HN!) identify Porkbun as "GoDaddy-Porkbun" but I don't know the relationship.

Edit: "Top Level Design [Porkbun owners] was the domain name registry for several top-level domains including .wiki, .ink and .design, until the company sold these domains to GoDaddy Registry in April 2023" --Wikipedia

Top tier is still MarkMonitor. Last I spoke with them, they had a five-figure minimum spend, but the per-domain costs are competitive. That cost buys you proper named support contacts, etc.

If you look up the whois for microsoft.com or yahoo.com, that's who you'll find.

Five-figure minimum spend sounds pretty expensive for the vast majority of businesses out there. Of course, just a drop in the bucket for major brands.

Definitely. I don't use them for my personal domains, of course.

But as others have pointed out, there's basically zero margin on simple domain sales. So if you want proper support, you need to go to someone who bundles it with other enterprise business (e.g. AWS), or who makes it their whole business (e.g. MM).

Hmm, Porkbun? Name.com? Something like Infomaniak if you prefer Europe?

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