As someone who has never purchased a domain for my sites, Porkbun proved to be quite a unique but simple experience and left me... oinking?
Top-level domain (TLD)
If you do not know what a TLD is, think .com, .gov, .net, etc. Think of TLD as the last portion of the final dot of a domain name.
A good example would be https://www.google.com/ where .com is the TLD portion of the link.
There are various types of TLDs out there but for this post, I want to talk about my own experience on purchasing a generic TLDs since for my use case, I simply wanted my own domain name for my portfolio.
If you wish to learn more, refer to this here: https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/dns/top-level-domain/
Choosing a domain provider
As you may or may not be aware, there are a bunch of domain providers out there: GoDaddy, Namecheap, Google Domains, etc, to name a few. There are various reasons to choose one or another but for my own use case, I wanted both cost and privacy for my domain name since I am quite inexperienced when it comes to this.
After some adequate research, I chose Porkbun, a domain name registrar located in the Pacific Northwest.
Sooo.. why Porkbun?
Personally? They had quite a cute logo of a pig and from browsing their site, they certainly have a lot of personality as a domain provider with the occasional jokes here and there; I quite like it when brands establish themselves with some flair or personality.
Features
Browsing through their site, Porkbun offers quite a bit when purchasing a domain from them
Since privacy is something I wanted, this definitely resolved one use case.
Competitor Pricing
When choosing a TLD, they feature a chart that lets you compare their own services to their competitors. I found this feature quite important because as they stated on their site:
We believe transparency is a key component in the trust relationship between you and us so we've decided to show how we stack up to some of our biggest competitors
The fact that they show comparisons between their competitors about their registration price, renewal price, included benefits, etc, is quite a strong selling point and I too believe in the statement where transparency is key when it comes to building a relationship with a brand.
Onto the purchase
Purchasing a domain couldn't be easier as I thought it would have taken a lot more effort to purchase AND setup the domain, but was I proved quite wrong..
Purchasing a Porkbun domain requires an account in order to manage your domain so off with the usual username, email, credit card, you know - the usual jazz when it comes to account creation.
Once I had a name in mind, I searched it up on their homepage, added to cart, and went through my transaction. Simple and easy, with nothing more.
Connecting my domain
This step, initially had me worried as I had no experience in setting up my own domain name with a third-party hosting provider. My portfolio is hosted on Vercel, on their hobby tier. However, I was determined to get my own name onto my portfolio so I did as anyone in my position would and googled for results from both providers to see if they had any guides.
Unexpectedly, they did! One article from Vercel docs and one from Porkbun, each one providing information and step-by-step guides on connecting domain names and their respective web host. I cross-referenced both guides when setting up my portfolio settings and didn't even realized I was done by the time I added the Vercel IP address to Porkbun's DNS page.
Live site here: https://hny-codes.com
Conclusion
There are plenty of documentation and articles out there to help understand domains and how to connect one to your site. At the end of the day, I am still inexperienced when it comes to TLDs, domains, etc, but this experience certainly taught me quite a lot to know. Flawless and smooth experience to both Vercel and Porkbun, they certainly deserve my praise for it.