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