So, I had a frustrating experience with Namecheap. They simply tripled the renewal price of my .com domain. I thought about transferring the domain and buying another one I need at Porkbun, but do they also have this kind of trick? Will they suddenly raise the price 3, 4, or 10 times? In my case, the price tripled in 1 year. Or is it better to just go with Cloudflare?

If anyone has experience with these domain registration sites, please clear this doubt for me.

I've been struggling to decide between namecheap, porkbun and hover as a domain registrar. I'm setting up a shopify store for e-commerce. There are so many pros and cons, hundreds of YouTube videos, most of which are repeating the identical script they probably found from chat GPT. And my head is genuinely tarting to physically hurt. I'm so overwhelmed.

Which one should I go for. I don't know much about web development at all. But from what I've heard this is what I need.

1. SSL certificates - the thing that makes my website safe and not look sketchy I guess??

2. Custom email hosting - so I can have my own custom email @ which is very professional and very cool.

3. Email forwarding so may all goes to my personal email?? (I guess this is good but I don't really know if I want that. I'd rather just log into my business email every time I want to respond to customers) - this just seems like it would inconvenience me and getting my way.

4. Domain forwarding could be very useful, so even if someone types the wrong domain, they would still end up on my website. (But not a necessity I suppose idk)

5. I barely even know what a sub domain is, but I think I need this. (Yes I will continue researching these things)

6. DNS management - the most important of all I reckon. From what I've learnt this is the thing that ensures that there are no connectivity issues. When people type in my website name they actually end up on my site + with no slow loading time etc)

The lower the price the better, but not if it means I'm going to have a headache running this business. I see the extra prices as a way of delegating the hard work to somebody who isn't me. You're very important for someone running their first business on their own.

I tried asking chat GPT, I did it for hours actually. But it kept giving me false info, I was incredibly biased for some strange reason, telling me the price per month for certain companies but the price per year for other companies. When I calculated the numbers they were all wrong. And even I barely know anything I had to correct it, it would agree and explain again, still getting things wrong. So I'm overwhelmed and coming to Reddit for help.

I won't get it from shopify in case I feel like I need to transfer it later. I'd rather own the domain individually, so shopify won't be an option.

Thank you in advance.

Hey All - My Google Domains started getting moved over to Squarespace this past week, and it's been a less than stellar experience. Not only do I not to control what account these domains end up in, managing domains in Squarespace is not what I'd call straight forward.

As a result, I went to the Interwebs and Reddit to see what was recommended. The same 3 kept getting recommended: Cloudflare, Porkbun, Namecheap

The trend on Namecheap - which I used a decade ago - is that it is no longer actually cheap, with constant price hikes & advertisements, so I ruled them out and decided to split my domains between Cloudflare & Porkbun, to see how the experience was. Worst case, I move the domains again in 60 days, if one is really horrible (yes, I would need to pay the cost to extend one more year).

Since there have been a few threads on this topic, I figured I'd share where I fell out - with details, in case it helps you make your decision:

• Cloudflare

  • Pros

    • Has every enterprise level feature & customization you could want, within policy (see below), although many of these are upsells

    • The transfer process is done in a way where it's very hard to screw up the DNS settings post-transfer (e.g. you need to move the NS over before you can initiate transfer)

    • Cheapest domains out there

    • Been around for a very long time, and relies on other revenue, so not likely to go out of business

  • Cons

    • The interface is very "heavy"; It's clearly built for Enterprises, not prosumers, and so it can take a bit of searching to find the thing you want

    • It feels like Cloudflare takes positions on the "right" way to do things, and for those things, there is no workaround. Examples include:

    • Not all ccTLDs supported yet (but the ~200 they cover were all I needed)

• Porkbun

  • Pros

    • Simple & straightforward, albeit quirky, interface

    • You can pretty much do whatever you want, including domain masking & email forwarding without pre-approval (this could also be abused)

    • Probably the 2nd cheapest domains

    • Other redditors have commented that their customer service is fast & friendly

    • I didn't count but their supported domain list seems much longer than CloudFlare's

  • Cons

    • Been around as long as Google Domains, so unclear if this business model is sustainable

    • UI is not the prettiest, or the best laid out, but it's so simple that's it's pretty easy to figure out

    • Because you can do anything you want, you could transfer your domain and lose all your previous settings, which would mean you would need to figure out what those records would need to be/reverify your domain

A good example of the experience between these two is SSL.

• Cloudflare: Since you had to have CF NS in order to transfer, CF automatically enables SSL (great!). To find that they did this, you would go to your domain, click on the SSL section, and see in the Overview that you have "Flexible" SSL on by default vs Full vs Full (strict) ... or off. Now they use diagrams to explain what each of these is, but you need to dig to understand what the difference is here vs a standard LetsEncrypt cert on a server. It turns out LE certs are equivalent to "full" (to my best understanding) and that "flexible" means just the connection between browser and CF is encrypted. So you can go and switch it to full ... for every domain you have.

• Porkbun: They have a simple listing of your domains, where you click details. One section is "SSL". If you click the small edit button, it will tell you that they can only generate SSL for you if you use their NameServers, and they give you a single click button to make the switch. You push the button, they update, and tell you that a cert is being generated using LetsEncrypt. You need to check back to see status switch from "Nothing yet" to "Have certificate" in green. This takes 10-20 minutes. You could do this rapidly for all domains, as they are all listed in a flat list. If you switched to their NameServers during transfer, this step is automatically done.

For me, while Porkbun is a bit fast and loose (and doesn't have as many options as Cloudflare), it's been a more enjoyable experience. I also didn't like that Cloudflare prohibits me from masking, and I'm worried about what else they will prevent me from doing in the future. While I understand some of these settings can be abused, they also can allow me to provide a more pleasant experience for simple things, like not showing an "ugly" URL.

If I was running an enterprise site, where I needed to tweak the hell out of everything to ensure optimal load times, while fending off DOS attacks, and needed workers to handle different end points with different situations, Cloudflare would be a great fit. I'm not doing that though.

I'll probably let these domains sit on both of these registrars for another 6 months to see if anything really breaks (I still have to see how the Sites redirects land). If something major pops up, I'll update the post.

I hope someone finds this helpful. :)

UPDATE (2024.07): I'm all in on Porkbun. Cloudflare made basic changes complicated and Porkbun support is absolutely phenomenal.