I have about a dozen domains with Porkbun and I like them a lot as a registrar. Now I need somewhere to put two small WordPress sites and their hosting is right there and cheap. I'm wondering whether keeping everything in one account is convenience or a single point of failure, and whether anyone has actually run their hosting for more than a few months. Budget is maybe $10 a month for both sites.
Ran their cPanel plan for a client for about a year. Unremarkable in the good way, no surprise repricing, support answered in hours rather than days. I moved off for reasons that had nothing to do with them.
On the single point of failure question, I keep domains and hosting apart on principle. Not because I distrust anyone in particular, but because the one time I had to leave a provider in a hurry, having the domain elsewhere meant I could repoint DNS in ten minutes instead of arguing with a support queue for a week.
Half-measure that works: leave the domains where they are but run DNS at a third party. Then a registrar going weird doesn't take the site down either.
Worth mentioning the registrar side is genuinely competitive right now: their .com list price sits around $11 and Cloudflare's at-cost is a bit under that. Both are about to move, because the .com wholesale fee goes from $10.26 to $10.97 on 1 November.
Twelve domains times seventy cents isn't going to change my life, but I'd rather know it's coming than be surprised by the invoice.
The convenience is real if you're the only person who ever touches it. The moment a client needs partial access to one thing and not the other, split accounts stop being optional.
@tiny_launch_tess · 6mo ago · 2 replies
They sell two different things and it's worth knowing which one you're buying: a WordPress product running on WP Cloud, which is Automattic's infrastructure, and a plain shared cPanel offering. The WordPress one is a genuinely different animal from typical budget shared hosting. Entry tiers land in roughly the $3-7 a month range depending which you take.
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@serp_gardener · 6mo ago
I hadn't clocked that they're two separate products at all. That changes the comparison considerably.
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