Recently tried to buy a domain through Porkbun since their name always comes up in these threads, but they wanted a picture of my ID. What other providers do you guys recommend?
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I heard about Njalla via this Lemmy comment but I haven’t tried them myself:
Run by Gottfrid Svartholm Warg of The Pirate Bay who has already served two prison sentences for acting on his beliefs around personal freedom and intellectual property.
If you try it report back lol
I used Njalla. It worked fine for me and was really simple to manage. In the end I decided to switch since their strength is also their weakness. You don’t own the domain, they own it. They register it to their name and you can manage it but when they go bankrupt (doesn’t look like it) or decide you are violating their terms (and maybe you aren’t but they still decide that you are) they can cancel your service and you are not able to get your domain back, since it was never in your name.
There are stories from people who lost their domain. But I only heard about this from others and I always find it questionable about why these people are coming out with these kind of stories, were they really not violating the terms or were they and are just upset that they got caught…
Njalla works this way to make sure nobody knows who you are and who registered the domain, because even if law enforcement would ask for the owner at the tld registrar they would get Njalla as the owner. And you don’t need to let Njalla know who you are, so that’s where it ends. But in the end I got nervous that someday they would cancel my domains or that they decided to stop the service and I would lose access to my domains and email. Is that a legit fear? Probably not. I have had domains with them for 5 years and never had a problem. You can transfer your domain since you can request the transfer key via the admin page and you will recieve one instantly. So you don’t really notice not owning the domain until something happens. Would I recommend them? Sure, if you want extra privacy and are fine with no ability to prove ownership of a domain might something happen.
I now have my domains at https://flokinet.is/. A company based in Iceland. The site is from the '10s and the billing section is slow but they where mentioned as a privacy friendly option as well and apart from the transfer (I did things wrong with DNSSEC and they where a bit slowish with response, but mostly due to my impatience) I haven’t had a problem with them.
I have a .ca domain at hosthero and a .ca domain at easydns if you are in Canada I would recommend them. They offer more than .ca if you are not in Canada.
I personally use cloudflare. Never had an issue with them.
What TLD did you choose on porkbun? Maybe it’s a national TLD that requires your ID. I have .EU, .me and .org domains with them and I was never asked for an ID.
I have bought two dozen domains (with common TLDs) on Porkbun and have never been asked for KYC.
I was going for one of the 6-9 digit .xyz domains. I can’t check exactly what the message said since it have me the option to delete my account, which I did, but I believe the gist of it was about fighting against spam
deleted by creator
It’s for the cheap “1.111B” 6 or 7 digit xyz domains. I think it’s a recent thing, but they’re basically being bought up en masse and used for botnets/spam, so as an attempt to stem the flow the .xyz registry asks for ID
I went for an .org and the same happened to me. After digging, Porkbun says is an automated flag of suspicious account, irrelevant to the TLD.
I’ve been using porkbun and they never asked my ID. Maybe it’s specific to the .xyz TLD? That surprises me but the domain you wanted are super cheap, so maybe they attract spammers. .xyz is somewhat disreputable anyway.
This is actually the first time I had heard of the 6-9 digit .xyz domains being discounted (.99/year). That was not mentioned on porkbun’s .xyz page, but web search found info. For those unaware, those domains register and renew at $0.99/year at some registrars, though $1.24 at porkbun.
And lol, almost everything I could think of related to mathematical constants were unavailable, e.g. 61803399.xyz. Some random ones were available and maybe I’ll try to buy one just to see what happens.
I wonder if porkbun suddenly requires ID for all domain purchases? That would be annoying. It’s been a while since I last bought from them.
Added: ok, this might help: https://kb.porkbun.com/article/225-why-porkbun-id-verification
Unpopular but cloudflare direct? I didn’t need to provide photo id for porkbun, buy I did sign up a while ago. Apart from that I have used gandi but they took a weird turn with their pricing etc
Ditto all of this.
There are no good decently priced domain registrars at the moment. Even porkbun is just a cloudflare reseller now. The only downside of going with cloudflare is that don’t let you use your own nameservers (at least that was true the last time I checked a few years ago), but if you don’t already know that you want that, you probably don’t need it.
I second this. I recently bought a domain from them, and they didn’t even ask for my name.
OVH for the win?
I use ovh
