Sure, happy to. It's a bit long-winded, though. For context, I'm in the UK and I'm registered as a business.
I was perfectly happy with Gandi until 2016 or so. Political changes in my country made dealing with the EU more complex and potentially more expensive, and I needed to to move my ~100 domain portfolio elsewhere. I originally started looking for a UK domain registrar[1] to keep the UK sales tax (VAT) simple and avoid the credit card fees & arbitrary conversion rate for an overseas transaction. I spent a Saturday or so scouting out options, factoring in:
* purchase and renewal price, with VAT
* overall look and feel of admin panels
* workflow of (and feedback on) transferring domains in and out, and other admin tasks
* how likely the company was to be eaten by another registrar
I've tended to have my web + email stuff split across multiple orgs to reduce instances of single point of failure:
* domains at one registrar, so I can keep track
* DNS at Cloudflare (reliably fastest at DNSPerf), all but one domain is on the the free plan with Cloudflare features disabled (i.e. purely DNS).
* hosting at a build-your-own cloud provider (DigitalOcean and recently Hetzner)
* email at managed provider (Fastmail currently)
Ultimately, UK registrars turned out quite expensive compared to north American registrars, with no clear advantage. Even with the VAT being reclaimable, the sums worked out in favour of looking overseas.
I found Porkbun when I was looking for off-piste domain registrars for a couple of ccTLD domains I had. There's a single .ag which is the most expensive to renew, and comparatively few registrars support it. I ran the numbers on the portfolio of domains for each of the off-piste registrars if I moved all the domains in…and that was expensive.
I told myself I could manage >1 domain registrar if I'm organised, so I re-ran the numbers with a split between the exotic TLDs and the boring ones. I was left with Namecheap & Porkbun for the boring (cheaper) domains. I registered 3x domains at each -- all burners, a ccTLD + a gTLD + their cheapest 99c offering -- and ran some tests. I ignored the SPOF stuff above since these were r&d domains, effectively. The tests included:
* how easy it was to administer via the control panel, including transfers in and out
* testing the support team with a minor, non-documented issue
* how much junk email I'd end up with
* the overall 'feel' of the registrar
Namecheap didn't fare well, sadly. The ccTLD I set up was transferred out (to Porkbun), but remained in the Namecheap control panel. I deliberately chose a .uk domain to test this with, since the process is a little whacky[2]. To their credit, Porkbun handled it seamlessly, exactly as their kb doc explained. Namecheap continued to send my expiry warnings about the domain (which was safe at Porkbun), and a support ticket was not able to have it removed from my account at Namecheap. Minor, granted, but enough to put me off.
Porkbun was mostly better out of the gate. I set up a CAA record on my burner domain (at Porkbun) and it broke DNS completely. I opened a ticket, explained what I'd done, and had a prompt, courteous reply back within a few hours. I'd used the wrong CAA syntax, which clobbered the DNS. When I fixed that, it worked perfectly. This not-in-the-kb support ticket stuff was not planned, but it worked out really well.
I moved all-but-one of my domains to Porkbun. I'd move the .ag domain if they supported it, but they don't yet. The .ag is languishing at Gandi, and there's a support ticket open with them (2 days and counting) to get an auth code to transfer out since it's not shown on the domain control panel, and with their upcoming price changes I'm keen to get that out before the PE folks turn it into a wasteland.
So, Porkbun: it works, they have a good experience that fits my workflow, and they don't have the upselling bullshit that GoDaddy and Namecheap seem to peddle.
