Porkbun vs 123-reg
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Porkbun and 123-reg.
Quick Verdict
4.5/5
Porkbun
0 reviews
3.0/5
123-reg
0 reviews
Porkbun is rated higher (4.5 vs 3.0). Porkbun is a budget-friendly registrar known for low prices on many TLDs, free WHOIS privacy, free SSL certificates, and a clean modern interface. Popular with developers for its API. 123-reg registers .uk and international domains with integrated hosting options. Designed for UK small businesses and individuals seeking bundled services at competitive introductory prices.
Porkbun Low-cost domains with free privacy and SSL | 123-reg UK domain registrar with hosting bundles — cheap first year, materially higher renewals | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 4.5 (0 reviews)✓ | 3.0 (0 reviews) |
| Pricing model | paid | paid |
| Starting price | From $11.08/mo | From $0.01/mo✓ |
| Best for | Budget-conscious developers and small businesses holding domains long-term who want the lowest honest renewal prices with free privacy and SSL | UK small businesses and individuals registering .co.uk/.uk names who want domains, email, and hosting bundled under one control panel and are comfortable budgeting at renewal prices. |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ✓ | |
| Automated backups | ✓ | |
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ||
| Free tier | ||
| Tags | ||
| Tags | api access | eu datacenter |
| Visit Porkbun → | Visit 123-reg → | |
Porkbun
Pros
- + Flat .com pricing — $11.08 to register, renew, and transfer, ICANN fee included
- + Published wholesale cost breakdown is rare transparency in this market
- + Free WHOIS privacy, wildcard SSL, Cloudflare DNS, DNSSEC, and email forwarding on every domain
- + Passkeys, WebAuthn security keys, and 2FA on accounts
- + Phone and chat support daily, answered by domain-knowledgeable staff
Cons
- - Smaller company than the industry giants; no 24/7 phone support
- - First-year sale TLDs renew significantly higher
- - No documented registry-lock product for brand portfolios
- - Registry fee increases pass through to renewal prices
123-reg
Pros
- + Established UK registrar since 2000 with 400+ extensions and consolidated domain, email, and hosting billing
- + Transparent first-year and renewal prices published together on 123-reg's own pages
- + Free .co.uk/.uk transfers in and free Nominet WHOIS privacy on UK domains
- + cPanel on hosting, 99.9% uptime guarantee, and DDoS protection with 24/7 monitoring on VPS
- + Bundles (domain + email + hosting + SSL) suit non-technical UK small businesses
Cons
- - Renewals jump sharply — .co.uk from £3.99 to £12.99/year, Economy hosting from £1.99/mo to £251.64 per 3-year term
- - WHOIS privacy for gTLDs costs extra (around £4.99/domain/year), compounding portfolio costs
- - UK-hours-only support with no published response-time SLA; phone support restricted to the UK
- - Backup advertising says daily; terms say files weekly and databases daily
- - April 2016 mass site-deletion incident across 67 servers remains on the reliability record
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