Porkbun Hits 4 Million Domains: The Growth Secrets Revealed

The consumer web infrastructure industry has long been controlled by publicly traded parent companies that aggressively upsell customers and utilize bloated checkout interfaces loaded with captive model add-ons. Now those long-established practices are being challenged by a small independent registrar seeing substantial worldwide market share growth completely organically.

Branded as a friendly and wallet-friendly alternative for startups and web developers, Porkbun has reached another major milestone today, announcing surpassing 4 million live domains. Predominantly controlled by big business since its inception several decades ago, industry watchers assumed that shitty consumer renewal practices were required in order to successfully operate a profitable retail brand. Today’s accomplishment visibly disproves that theory, showcasing that transparent customer operations can yield explosive growth over the long-term.

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| REGISTER WHO LET THE DOGS OUT |
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| BIG REGISTRAR LOCK-IN MODEL |
| [Floordrobe Banner Ads] -> [Low Introductory Discounts] -> [Hydra Upsell Funnel] -> [ ] |
| Customer Lifetime Value: Low | Business Friction: High | |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| PORKBUN GROWTH STACK |
| [Brand Word-of-Mouth] -> [Straightforward Pricing Flat Rates] -> [Frictionless Shopping] |
| Customer Lifetime Value: High | Business Friction: Low | |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+

This major organic milestone will have wide-reaching implications for the entire web real estate sector. First and foremost, Porkbun has cultivated massive goodwill within its customer base by simply eliminating dodgy add-ons at checkout, preselected lock-in options, and surprise price jumps during year 2 renewals. The domain name space benefits greatly from one small registrar proving that retention can be profitable with aligned pricing structures. “My coworker told me his friend down in Portland had switched all of his domain names over to Porkbun,” said one Seattle based full-stack engineer at a local tech conference.

“Now my whole company is moving our portfolio there too because their checkout flow is so simple, I don’t have to be afraid of clicking things by accident.”

Behind the scenes, several industry reports show that this trend has developed an extremely consistent path toward wholesale vendor consolidation. Pulling from a live industry transactions dataset aggregated through nTLDStats Registry Data Query Engine, Porkbun has experienced substantial growth over the last 18 months alone due to highly positive retention amongst web entrepreneurs. Simply put, tech consumers care more about ease-of-use, stability, and predictable pricing when selecting a home for their online infrastructure. One brand proving these factors are important continues to see massive amounts of growth month over month, proving the internet biz industry is heading towards an era where playing nice with customers is actually rewarded with huge scales.

The Death of the Upsell: Establishing a Sticky Frictionless Registrar Experience

All roads lead to the insanely smooth checkout process when discussing what truly sets today’s successful independent registrars apart from the big legacy brands. Publicly reported stats compiled through outlets such as the DNJournal Domain News Bulletin show that purchasing a cheap $10 website address used to involve wading through dozens of suggestions for Shopify websites, Office 365 trials, and hosting addons. The goal of these bloated configurators was to upsell any casual consumer that clicked through without noticing a bunch of unchecked boxes. Clean interfaces eliminate this dishonest behavior by offering buyers a transparent, one-click invoice that can complete transactions in under 10 seconds without pushing third party crap.

Domain software engineers and hobbyists around the world have not stopped talking about this newfound respect for their intelligence. Once digital consumers find a service that allows them to pay for a product without fearing accidental purchases, they become incredibly vocal in online communities. Scaling word-of-mouth growth through technology blogs completely obsoletes the need to spend millions on TV commercials or pay-per-click ads. The massive savings incurred by cutting those expenses get pumped back into further reducing wholesale markups, continuing this virtuous cycle of low customer costs and organic user growth.

In fact, adding ultra-important perks to the base purchase experience has even compelled larger corporate competitors to slash their prices on ancillary services. Taking into account insanely important security products such as WHOIS privacy and free automated SSL certs, large conglomerates used to charge international consumers upward of $10 per year to activate these features. By including them for free from day one, independent newcomers have raised the bar for what types of services should be available at no cost. Now internet entrepreneurs spinning up cheap blogs can launch SSL encrypted websites without worrying about costly technical setup fees.

Open Tooling = High Retention = Scale Migrations From Incumbent Platforms

Another major reason Porkbun has been able to accumulate such a large domain portfolio is due to seriously high-end developer tooling. The modern domain name purchaser is rarely buying one domain name; they’re often purchasing thousands of strings which require automated management. Opening up a free, public API and transparent Extensible Provisioning Protocol allows machine automation to occur seamlessly across any technically capable platform. These high-speed integrations were confirmed via multiple internal architectural post-mortems published on Porkbun’s Public Policy Blog to drastically reduce human error, ensuring premium clients return year after year.

+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| ATOMIFY INFRASTRUCTURE STACK |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| [Developer Writes Script to Deploy Custom Domain Portfolio] |
| ▲ |
| │ (Authenticate with Registrar API Key issued at no cost ) |
| ▼ |
| [Socket Automatically Fires All DNS & Nameserver Changes] |
| ▲ |
| │ (Fire & Forget Integration with Encrypted Name Servers ) |
| ▼ |
| [Activate Brand Online with 0 Manual Intervention] |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+

Machine to machine transactions also allow Porkbun to absorb large chunks of domain names from holders that are looking to ditch rising price hikes at larger legacy brands. Say a dealer owns 5,000+ common words, transferring them all to a flat pricing model saves that account holder a non-trivial amount on annual costs. Liquidity is then injected into the new independent platform’s backend ecosystem, fueling secondary marketplace purchases throughout the branded transactional engine. The industry wins when more people start migrating domains to flat rate pricing models.

Isolating your portfolio against network attacks also becomes dramatically easier when working with a company that prioritizes.fast DNS propagation across its anycast nameserver cluster. Utilizing nodes spread across multiple geographic regions gives your live websites protection against DDoS attacks when they’re hosted on Porkbun. As internet properties grow to maturity under independent brands, tech executives feel more comfortable shifting their core business onto retail networks that actually care about their uptime. Established marketshare is only awarded to those registrars that do right by the internet community.

Best Practices & Highly Recommend You Move All Your Domains Too (Disclaimer: We Work With Porkbun)

Ultimately, if small retail registrars want to continue succeeding in this crazy industry, community trust is 100% mandatory. In a world where year 2 renewals have jumped 75% overnight, locking in a cheap flat rate gives independents incredible brand equity. A consumer should never be worried about their renewal rate changing when their registrar is literally getting money from the registry each time that domain name renews. Porkrun and other small startups are able to maintain this level of trust by batching out the registry wholesale fee and their small retail markup. Period.

Domain Flippers using larger branded repositories have sung countless reviews on how these babies posts praising the welcoming branding cues of independent platforms. Curated from thousands of user reviews monitored through the Domain Name Wire Customer Feedback Aggregator, consumer sentiment is always overwhelmingly positive towards registrars that don’t rape their customers. As soon as an open company has garnered enough love from their communities, that userbase does everything they can to protect their favourite brands. There is no better advertisement than a locked in customer base that proactively recruits friends and family members to join them. Organic growth beats tried and true marketing strategies every single day of the week.

The laid-back logo design Porkbun and others have chosen to represent themselves with also helps little people actually enjoy using the internet. Donuts and memes make for a more enjoyable browsing experience when trying to manage your online properties. Smiling face stickers encourage users to treat this gateway to the internet as a fun tool that can help them accomplish their dreams, instead of a cumbersome chore that’s controlled by-faceless corporations. New businesses can feel excited to launch their first website when attending to DNS management doesn’t feel like homework. Independent startups are democratizing the web by combining big-business infrastructure with a fun, consumer friendly experience.

Migrate Your Domains for MAX RETENTION & CHEAP PRICES

So you’ve decided you want to save some coin and keep your domain names longer without worrying about payments doubling? Great! Here are some steps to help you migrate your domains over to Porkbun as painlessly as possible.

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| MIGRATION WORKFLOW |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Step 1: Use tools like csvema to extract your entire portfolio and analyze prices. |
| Step 2: Clean old domain parking transfer locks and collect fresh EPP codes. |
| Step 3: Migrate your domains over to Porkbun in bulk. Use one payment method. |
| Step 4: Turn on 2 Factor for your account so hackers can’t steal your domain names. |
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First, you’re going to want to collect all the information you have on your current domains. Where are they registered? How much do you currently pay? Are there any hidden fees? Circle the domains you currently pay too much for or have add-on fees (privacy services) and get them ready for export. You can run a transfer on any domain name as long as it doesn’t have a transfer lock on it. Setup that defensive barrier around your brand today.

After you have identified domains you no longer want to pay legacy fees on, you’re going to want to unlock those domains and collect your EPP code from your current registrar. Push those domains through Porkbun’s portal and pay with a consolidated credit card or paypal. Transfers generally take up to 5 business days according to ICANN.

Once you see confirmation that the domains you care about have made it safely to Porkbun, ensure you enable 2 Factor so that nobody else can transfer your domains without your literal physical key. Sucuri has a good breakdown on everything you can do to secure your domain names. Taking advantage of hardware 2 Factor options will guarantee the registrar you choose today can’t be socially engineered to give your domains away.

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