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Kicked NameSilo to the curb
raindog308
Administrator, Veteran
in Providers
No real issues with their service but…
- the interface is 1990s and glacial at times
- everything is batch so any changes take 10 mins to show up
- DNS can take longer
Although I hate to support Portland, Oregon, my renewals are coming up so I moved everything to Porkbun.
Comments
What's the deal with Portland, OR?
(recently kicked Porkbun to the curb...)
Isnt Porkbun based in Sherwood, Oregon?
Eh actually my inner neckbeard liked that ui.
If you lived here, you'd know. It's a hellhole.
Oh, you're right. Why was I thinking Portland? Sherwood is OK. My gun club is there.
I now feel much more guilt-free.
I think they were originally based in Portland? For example their LinkedIn page still says Portland: https://www.linkedin.com/company/Porkbun. Their site changed from "based in Portland" to "based in the Pacific Northwest" at some point.
I am not American and have no clue about any states. But I do know there's 0% sales tax in oregon. That might be why they moved there.
Well, same is true of a couple other states, but if people are moving for tax reasons, it's either because they're going to open up a big facility and get tax breaks (not relevant here), or because they want 0% state income tax.
Oregon's is a brutal 10%. On top of, oh, 35%-ish Federal
OTOH, if you drive 20 minutes North, you're in Washington. There you'll pay 6.5% sales tax, but no income tax, and probably be significantly better off if you're above the poverty line.
Did you have an issue with them?
Admittedly I don't understand the entire system for US. But I am quite sure they pay corporate tax (different rates from personal income tax). A quick googling shows that the federal corporate tax is 21%, and in oregon, the state corporate tax would be 6.6% for 1st million and 7.6% above that and apparently the average corporate tax is 6%. Oregon may not have the lowest corporate tax, but the sales tax more than makes up for it (probably)
I am sure there's a lot of factors they considered and maybe I am entirely wrong. But I think 0% sales tax is quite a big deal when they have such low margins. I am no economist, but the corporate tax is probably on the profits. The sales tax would be on all domain registrations/renewals and the addon services they sell (all revenue). The sales tax probably matters more in this context. (Especially when the corporate tax is added onto the federal corporate tax, while there's no federal sales tax)
Actually I realize sales tax is charged based on the billing address. But do they really do this for overseas customers? Maybe the benefit comes for those countries with 0% sales tax? (A quick googling tells me depending on the circumstances the sales tax may be charged based on origin or destination, I am sure their lawyers have it figured out such that they make $$$)
I'm gonna assume this is due to switching to remote work over the pandemic. No reason to maintain an office/facility in the middle of a city if most of the workforce is remote.
Purely an hypothesis as I know nothing about Porkbun's internal operations.
I have some domain name with them (NameSilo) and have a good experience. I got fast and friendly answers from their support previously. They are ICANN accredited with some free features (url and email redirects etc). Prices not bad.. I use my own nameservers so don't know much about their NS update speed. Their interfaces is probably not 'up to date' but.. it transparent and work well. Maybe i'm wrong but it for 'experts' not for generic, "i dont know what i doing" users. (Truly the good prices, good support, working services is more important to me than the interface/design).
Godaddy have probably beautiful interface, with irreal renewal prices (with doubled or x3 prices).
@NoComment - sorry I misunderstood your point. it had not occurred to me that domains would be subject to normal state sales tax, but apparently they are.
PB would be required to collect other states sales tax and forward to that state if they have a physical nexus (ie a store or office) in that state but I’m sure PB doesn’t.
This is tricky these days, in the USA at least.
People used to avoid taxes by buying from stores outside their home state and avoiding the tax, since online sales out-of-state weren't charged sales tax. Some stores like B&H even advertised this on their site, e.g. "no sales tax for online purchases made by customers outside of New York!" Similarly you could buy items on Amazon from third-party sellers based in other states to avoid the sales tax. Technically, you're supposed to report these purchases on your income tax return and pay the tax (referred to as "use tax"), but nobody actually does that.
Anyways, brick and mortar stores got angry about it, and now you need to pay taxes even for out-of-state purchases.
What I'm unsure about is how (if all) this applies to the purchase of digital goods and services (domains, servers, etc) rather than physical goods, and which tax rate applies. I assumed the legislation was specific to physical items, but I'm not so sure. We need a LowEndTaxExpert in here
I know that Australia requires overseas companies to register their business for tax purposes in Australia, and collect sales tax (GST) at point of sale even for digital goods, as long as the company's income from Australian customers is over AU$75,000 per year. https://www.ato.gov.au/Business/International-tax-for-business/GST-on-imported-goods-and-services/How-to-charge-GST/If-you-are-a-merchant/ and https://www.ato.gov.au/business/international-tax-for-business/Non-resident-businesses-and-GST/. It makes things tricky since the company has to start doing Australian tax returns even though they're based overseas.
So you'll see larger providers (like DigitalOcean) and companies with digital products (like Steam) charge Australian users 10% tax. Other countries might be similar.
Lately namesilo website performance has been great but yep it seems a bit dated. I considered moving last 2 years but happy to say now things work much better and I'm pretty happy now with them knocks on wood. I have a few domains with porkbun as well but the domain itself does sound pretty unprofessional lol
I don’t mind the dated interface. I just wish changes made would update quicker
I have a domain there, prepaid for 5(?) more years (originally bought 9, I think).
Yeah, the interface is from the 1990s but I don't think I ever logged in after initially setting my nameservers, and their dirt cheap pricing was definitely worth more than looking at such a historical sight.
I agree with you! From my experience, porkbun works great, their pricing is good and their support is responsive, but what a weird name... I guess that this is something that makes it easy to remember.
Best part is, they're here
Didn't they have a new beta UI for years?
@raindog308 why not cloudflare?
Nothing technical, no.
Let's say... ethical disagreement over their endorsing some technologies.
domain itself does sound pretty unprofessional lol
More like offensive to some people due to religious reasons.
Sorry to read that. I love namesilo bc it is easy to use, it has 2fa, good prices, and idc about dns, i just send them to cloudflare
I look at tld-list and transfer domains every year to get the best prices.
yoursunny.com is moved from Name.com 🍜 to Porkbun 🐷 for $6.90.
ndn.today will likely move from Porkbun 🐽 to Cloudflare Registrar ☁️ next month.
I plan to delete
yoursunny.cnas it hasn't been used for many years and it's a headache paying with Chinese Yuan.NetDynamics24 is kicked to the curb because I have grudge against them:
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/3222747/#Comment_3222747
I did the same thing, for mostly the same reason but also cheaper price at the same.
No real reason. I had some PB domains already from their "10 years for $5" promos (e.g. the lowend.party domain I use in tutorials, etc.)
Yeah...I'm lazy and keep my DNS with my registrar in most cases, and with NS it was always a 15-20 minute wait. With others it's instant for a new query. (Yes, I know how DNS works, but NameSilo only updates their DNS on a pretty slow batch cycle).
Kinda like GoDaddy. Or Internet.BS and their big-testicle'd bull. But yes, I agree. Then again, some of the biggest tech companies in the world are "Google" and "FaceBook".
Eh...the pork-avoiding peoples I've known are not offended by the existence of pork, they just don't consume it themselves.
I'm not into dim sum, but I think a "pork bun" could actually be stuffed with anything. It's an Americanized translation of a Chinese term I believe.
I used porkbun dns for some of my sites and it updates instantly. I am happy enough with it
I personally love namesilo and simplicity of the GUI. Heard porkbun suspends your domain if it gets marked suspicious by Google Safe Browsing . Not sure that was a thing in the past though
Did you considered CloudFlare?
Say I'm running XYZ hosting in the USA and start selling over $75K to Australia. How would Australia even know that and, how would Australia enforce penalties against a hosting company not under the jurisdiction of Australian law?
I used to love Name.com, but they've gotten too expensive over time. They used to be the cheapest. I registered daniel15.com with them way back in 2006, and dansoftaustralia.com in 2003 but accidentally let it expire and it showed a parking page for 5+ years before I could get it back <_<
This is the part I'm not sure about! I have no idea how they do this. The US and Australia are pretty close though (the Internal Revenue Service in the USA and the Australian Taxation Office share info between each other) so I'd be surprised if they didn't already have this knowledge for companies that are doing that many cross-border sales.
EU has laws like that too, such as GDPR, where they apply even if the company is located outside the EU, as long as the user is in the EU. The fines for GDPR violations are based on worldwide revenue rather than only EU-sourced revenue.