## 125.1 – Eddie Barksdale (Porkbun)

Jesse Friedman: Welcome to Impressive Hosting, where we uncover the core tenets of great WordPress hosting. I’m your host, Jesse Friedman. Before we dive in, remember to check out impressive.host. It’s where you can comment on episodes, ask follow-up questions, and submit questions for upcoming guests. You’ll also find all our links to follow, like and subscribe wherever you listen. With me today is Eddie Barksdale, partner manager at Porkbun. Eddie, thanks so much for joining us today. We have a lot to talk about around the world of registrars and what’s happening at Porkbun, but if you could jump in by telling us a little bit about yourself first, that’d be great.

Eddie Barksdale: Hey Jesse. Thanks for having me. So my name is Eddie Barksdale, partner manager at Porkbun.com. I’ve been with Porkbun a little over five years. I started kind of all over the place originally as one of two people working weekend support. And I’ve transitioned around the company, so it’s really fun to be here.

Jesse Friedman: Nice. And so you started in support, that’s really cool. You were getting to know your customers firsthand. How does that translate into the work you’re doing now as a partner manager?

Eddie Barksdale: It’s really great having that experience, really understanding kind of what the customer wants. That’s more or less the driving force behind Porkbun is trying to address customer needs rather than some more superficial or imagined idea.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, no, we put a premium on support here at Automattic and we’ve talked to a variety of different hosting companies who think about support in different ways. One of the things that we keep going back to is that support is a great way for you to understand your customer and be customer first focused. But it’s interesting because folks like us who work in partnerships and talk to other hosting companies or other companies in general, they’re all a partner, but then in a sense, they’re also a customer. And many times they’re also a conduit to even more customers and mutual customers. And that adds a new dynamic. It’s really interesting. So listen, you’re wearing a shirt that says Porkbun. Below it you have a big number there. What are you celebrating?

Eddie Barksdale: It’s the 3 million domains under management. It’s quite a nice milestone for us. Porkbun has just crossed over its 10th year this last March. We hit a million domains, I think it was four years ago. It took us another two, two-ish years to hit 2 million and another 15 months to hit three.

Jesse Friedman: That’s awesome. So by that count in about nine months, you’ll be at four, huh?

Eddie Barksdale: Exactly. We like this pacing.

Jesse Friedman: So what does it mean when a domain is under management? What does that actually mean?

Eddie Barksdale: It means that it’s part of, it’s under our registrar credentials. So that’s whether it was registered at Porkbun, somebody transferred it over. One way or another it lives on Porkbun.com.

Jesse Friedman: Right. And so when folks are going and purchasing domains, do you have a good understanding of what their intent is, what they’re hoping to achieve, and are they still searching for domains independent of hosting? Or do they try to package it up and always go with domain and hosting together?

Eddie Barksdale: Yeah. We still have a pretty wide gamut of customers. There is definitely a lot of folks that are more on the investment or speculative side. They have an interesting idea. Maybe they’re not the one that wants to see it through, but they think it’d be good to grab that name one way or another and hold it for a little bit. Also, we have a large developer freelancer type crew that may have a lot of different ideas for projects and whatnot, hopes and dreams. They try and get that domain name set up in the hope that they’ll eventually develop it. I think more and more people are getting to a state where these hopes and dreams are able to be developed faster. Obviously AI is a huge proponent for that. As well as just the ease and finer improvements with hosting in general.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. You know, it’s interesting because I think that people buy domains for many different reasons. Obviously you covered a few there. You have a goal in mind. You have a project you want to build. So you buy a domain and you point it at a website. Other times you’re protecting a brand, so you’re buying a bunch of versions of your domain. Maybe you have an idea, but you don’t know what it is yet, but you want to protect it because you got a cool name. You know, it’s something that I used to see a lot more often that I don’t see as often these days, and I wonder if it’s because a younger generation doesn’t necessarily understand domains as well, but you can buy a domain and frankly point at anything you want to, and I don’t think that people are taking advantage of that as much as they could be. So there’s opportunities obviously with like Link in Bios and stuff like that where it is technically considered hosting and you tie it to that. But frankly, you could buy a domain and point it to your Instagram account. You could point it to a friend’s website. You could do whatever you wanted to do there. Do you feel like, and maybe you’re not so closely knit to this generation, so feel free to say like, I’m not in this, but do you feel like the youngest generation that are on the internet now have a good understanding of what is actually happening on the internet and the tools and the things that they have in front of them to help them build a stronger brand or a presence?

Eddie Barksdale: I think not even just the youngest generation, but a lot of generations sometimes forget the importance of just having a website, having a web presence. I mean, how often do you look up like a restaurant in your local town? And there’s no menu, there’s no website. You all you have is the Google Maps listing and what other people are saying about it, which might be a good indication of what that restaurant’s quality is. But everyone should have some type of way to get their word out there. Whether it is, maybe you are more active on Instagram, maybe you are more active on TikTok, like you said, you can have your domain name point to it. And with the plethora of new TLDs that are out there, there’s a lot of chances that you might get a very descriptive domain name one that could even match your social media handles in a lot of cases. I’ve seen that in a couple cases. Like, I can’t think of the exact one, but like, say, something.tech, and that might be their actual social media handle. It just makes a very nice, smooth approach to your personal branding.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, I agree. You know, it’s interesting. Bluesky, one of the newer social media platforms out there, and really focused on creating like an open environment, allows for you to make your domain your actual username. So my username on, or my avatar on Bluesky is jesse.blog. And that I think that’s really cool because it gives you a little bit more prominence around a piece of the internet that you own. I think that you’re absolutely right that it’s not just the youngest generation, but I think there’s a large portion of folks who didn’t come up when the internet was really forming that don’t necessarily understand all the really cool things that exist on the internet. And you run into this situation where these younger folks are utilizing what they think is the whole internet, but it really ends up being these like consolidated silos. You know, we look at obviously social media, but then maybe a lot of their shopping is done on Amazon. All their searching is done on Google, and they tend to think that this is what is the internet. But when I came up, it was so different. Everyone had their own bit of real estate, their own ownership of the internet. And the first thing you do is go buy a domain so that you could claim it as something that somebody could find very easily. I think that when I talk to my daughter, for example, one of the things that we kind of talk about, she’s so familiar with this stuff because of where I work and what I do, but it’s funny to me that her friends need to be explained that there is this whole other side of the internet and there are millions of other websites out there. You can carve out your own little ownership of it. And it’s interesting that you mentioned these new TLDs when I was coming up, it was like dot-com, dot-org, dot-gov, and then you’d have to start coming up with some crazy names. Adding additional vowels or removing vowels altogether. It was like a common thing. I remember when Dribbble came out, they added an extra B, just so they could capture that domain. But now there’s so many TLDs and then in fact, there’s actually the new auction is coming up, right? So we’re gonna actually see a whole bunch of new TLDs as well. Can you just real quick, just for folks who are listening at home, what is a TLD and what is the future happening that’s coming up real soon around the release of new TLDs?

Eddie Barksdale: Yeah, so TLD is top-level domain. It’s often sometimes referred to as right of the dot. So that would be dot-com, dot-org, dot-info, dot-blog. These are kind of more or less what you could imagine as a namespace owned by a wholesaler. So these are all owned by different registries and whatnot. They work with ICANN, the non-governmental agency that regulates the entire domain industry to have that. So when you go and register a domain, you’re registering something underneath one of those top-level domains. So, for instance, my website, eddiebarksdale.com, that’s under dot-com as the TLD. And then in 2013, we had the new round of TLDs, and we got all these kind of really descriptive, really brandable, sometimes also focused on geo regions. All these different domain names that just provide a whole bunch of new options for people to have something that’s shorter, brandable, more memorable, and I believe it’s 2027, I think is when the next round of auctions will be. Folks will get to see, try and claim a top-level domain that’s not out there yet. I think everyone is looking to see who will end up owning dot-crypto, for instance. And those will come out, registrars will adopt them and you’ll be able to own something under all those new ones as well.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. I think you said 2027, but if I’m not incorrect. I think it might actually be April of next year, 2026. And it’s interesting to see what will be coming out, and I’m sure that registrars like yourself are gonna see an influx of registrations right away. But I do like the idea of using these TLDs to be able to get brand names that you might not otherwise be able to get or your own personal name. Or like you said, your social media account would be really interesting. And so we talked a little bit about domains now. So like, let’s talk about hosting. Porkbun is unique in the sense that it’s a registrar first, but it also provides really superior hosting. And so when we started talking as companies, we talked to you guys a while back and you were offering WordPress hosting, and then we started talking about WP Cloud and what we can help you to support there. And so you guys have released an update that basically migrated sites to WP Cloud and also is utilizing it for your new WordPress customers. Tell us a little bit about what it’s like to be a registrar first, but then you’re trying to provide really excellent hosting at the same time. And Porkbun I think is just, it’s a very unique name, but it’s also very synonymous with high quality and really great support. So I’m sure you had to think about that a lot too when you were trying to figure out how to get into hosting as well.

Eddie Barksdale: Yeah, I mean, when we first started we wanted to be the registrar that we wanted to work with. And that was really having a close, narrow view of like, how do we be the best domain registrar? Hosting for us at that time was kind of, well, we have to have something, and people will need something. They’ll want to have the convenience of having it in one place. Our client base at the time, like I said, was maybe more focused developers, people who kind of knew what else they wanted for hosting. Since then, as we’ve gained in popularity, our reputation has kind of pushed out there. We have newer customers coming in that would like really nice hosting with that. So we started looking at it. A lot of our hosting products were self-hosted things that we were able to spin up pretty easily. But with bringing on WP Cloud, bringing on other partners, that’s allowed us to put something that other people are the best in this space, so why not partner with them? We keep doing what we do best of offering great support, offering great domain names at great prices, and have this just provide something that is more bundled together in an easier way.

Jesse Friedman: Right. Yeah. And honestly that’s the mission that we set out for with WP Cloud was to be able to say we are providing WordPress as a platform as a service, and how can we help make companies like yourself successful in the hosting space, but not have to be the ones doing all of the work of managing the platform, managing the infrastructure, handling everything around performance and updates and all that stuff. So it’s nice because you guys have been a really great representation of how WP Cloud can come in and provide an underlying service, but your brand maintains at the top. You guys are the first point of contact to those customers. You own those customers, you maintain that relationship with them, and everything just kind of works seamlessly underneath. How have things gone since the migration that, you know, is kind of a leading question, obviously, but it seems like your customers are quite happy and things have gone very smoothly.

Eddie Barksdale: Yeah, I mean, I know for our support team it was kind of a nice lift, not having many intricacies of our self-hosted environment, not having to know it so thoroughly. Having a partner, I mean, you guys obviously understand WordPress at a different level. So having that kind of knowledge, shared knowledge just allows us to push further into things and I know WordPress continues to still be like one of our best-selling hosting add-ons. It’s been great.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. And so when you look at these customers that are coming on and buying domains first, what do you think is their thought process around hosting? Do you think that they’re already coming in thinking I need WordPress, or are they trying to just buy a domain and then figure out the rest later and they’re gonna do all their research later? How much does Porkbun play a role in helping them to make a decision around where to host their site?

Eddie Barksdale: Yeah, I mean, depending on where the customer’s coming from, I’d say it’s 50-50 whether they understand kind of what the next steps are or they already have everything all planned out, everything ready to go, they’re ready to move. For us, we want to be gentle in our approach. We’ve never been one to stack five pages in front of the cart before they even get to put their payment information. Like, oh, you need this, you need this, you need that. Get this deal really quickly. We want people to take things step at a time. So people will go on Porkbun, they search for a domain, they register that domain. There’s kind of no friction there. At that point then we’re suggesting like, hey, so here are some ways to, you’ve got a great domain. Here’s some ways to now get that domain up and running. Get your site up there. And WP Cloud WordPress is one of the top things that we feature in that just because it is something that, whether it’s something someone else has heard of or they’re gonna be working with a future developer or their own marketing team. People know WordPress. People understand WordPress. They know how to build for it, code for it, create themes for it. So having that present for them when they’ve done the process of, oh, what domain name do I want? I guess I’ll choose this one. It helps smooth that process out from our standpoint.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, and I think it does something else too. So there’s something that’s really important that keeps coming up on this podcast, which is that we talk to these hosting companies around the core tenets of great WordPress hosting, and one of the things that we revisit all the time is that hosting companies have a responsibility to WordPress in the sense that the first WordPress experience that a customer has can often be their last. So if a hosting company is not doing a great job of providing WordPress as a service, or if they’re bombarding that user experience with add-ons or upsells or different additional services, things like that. The customer experience can be pretty poor. But the thing is, the customer doesn’t always necessarily think that their WordPress experience is gonna be significantly better somewhere else. So then they end up going to something else completely and they leave the WordPress ecosystem, which is just bad for everyone in this space. So I think that it’s really great that Porkbun is identifying that as an opportunity to not only help your customers, but you’re also thinking about it from an ecosystem standpoint and the benefits that exist there from WordPress. But I think it’s also really important to think about it from the fact that that domain, as we talked about earlier, can be pointed anywhere, right? So when you buy that domain, you could end up pointing it at a Squarespace or Shopify or something like that. And then it’s outside of the WordPress ecosystem. And our primary focus inside of the WordPress community is to continue to grow our market share because we know the value that comes from building the internet on top of an open platform like WordPress. So I’m curious, like does, is this something that comes up for Porkbun or do you think other registrars are thinking about it? Like, do you think that from a perspective of someone who’s selling domains, is it common that the industry is thinking about where that domain ends up? Or is it more just about registering those domains and getting as many of them as possible?

Eddie Barksdale: It’s definitely a concern of where that domain ends up. I mean, we’ve tried to make it as easy as possible for people to use their domains because if somebody’s using their domain, they’re gonna keep their domain. If it’s not providing value for you, why would you keep it? And we understand that we’re not gonna tell people, oh, you should just hold onto it for fear’s sake. Instead it’s no, get some use out of it. Again, you could point it towards social media profile. We have a few other hosting options. WordPress is a super easy one. Again, because it’s familiar for a lot of devs and marketers in the industry we’ve added other elements onto it to try and make it even easier for someone who maybe doesn’t have as much experience with coding or with the WordPress environment. We have a little AI site builder that helps get people through it. Get at least some content started, right? Get something that looks like a website rather than just looks like a parking page. And of course we still think about our power users. They just want to get into WP Admin, install Elementor, upload their themes or whatever. So we try and make that easy enough for people to go down whatever branching path they want without putting too many forks in the road, per se.

Jesse Friedman: Sure. Yeah, that makes sense. And Porkbun sells obviously a variety of TLDs. Real quick question. Do you have a favorite TLD right now?

Eddie Barksdale: Well with Chinese New Year coming up, it’s gonna be the year of the horse and dot-horse is one.

Jesse Friedman: Dot-horse is a TLD. Okay.

Eddie Barksdale: It is, it’s quite a funny one for us.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, I’m curious how much business there is behind horses in the equestrian world there. That’s interesting. So with that, I’m always thinking about personalization and the way in which we can kind of talk to customers about their intent and their motivations. I’m curious, like, do you see the choice that they make around the TLD as an indicator of anything that can help you to push them in the right direction around hosting?

Eddie Barksdale: Yeah. I mean, we don’t really do anything too active with that. We’ve done some tests like for instance, there’s a dot-bio, and we’ve done some work with them to try and advertise our Link in Bio product. It makes a pretty easy pathway for that understanding of that. Same with, we’ve worked a little bit with dot-link on that as well. Kind of these easier use cases are a bit simpler to kind of advertise hosting for sometimes.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. Yep. And on that front, like when you do have customers choosing WordPress, obviously with WP Cloud, we’re taking care of a lot of the performance and security, but to be honest with you, like the way in which we’re selling WP Cloud right now is that that’s all baked in because it’s table stakes. It’s required for us to be able to provide a great experience. Do you think customers are looking for that right now? Like, are they evaluating Porkbun specifically on your performance and security, or do they just kind of assume that that’s gonna work great for them and that they don’t need to think about that?

Eddie Barksdale: I think customers are very discerning and the ability to do research one way or another is just so much easier these days. One of the platforms that I personally am active on on behalf of the company is on Reddit. And seeing kind of what feedback people have, what questions people have. And people do weigh these decisions very, very carefully. Do I go with, do I go with my registrar? What platform do I use from there? How do I get this set up in the way that I’m gonna be successful on day one rather than successful nine months out from now? Folks just don’t have, don’t have the time to invest this much thought and energy and love into something and have it struggle because of some small reason that’s outside of their control. They want something that’s gonna perform. And that’s something we’re watching closely is just how do we make sure our products are up to snuff? And again, that’s kind of why we push more into, let’s partner with people who are experts rather than just rely on our own knowledge.

Jesse Friedman: Right. Makes sense. So you’re in, so you’re monitoring Reddit then. I’m curious, when we talk to other hosting companies, we talk about the ways in which they’re interacting with customers. We had a great conversation with Tom Fanelli at Convesio, and he talks about how he brings his customers into Slack. Bluehost Cloud has this phone support that takes you right to tier three when you’re on the Bluehost Cloud product, which is really cool because it’s kind of like a bat phone. And obviously you guys are providing great support and it’s something I think Porkbun is known for. But I’m curious, like, do you think that a hosting company has a responsibility to do a little bit more outreach? You’re mentioning that you’re going on Reddit, is that more from a marketing perspective or is it from a support perspective or both?

Eddie Barksdale: The way we approach it, we say that support is marketing. So depending on how you are actually presenting to your customers, where you’re meeting them and offering them solutions, that is marketing. That is how you’re getting your word out because word-of-mouth marketing is still one of the strongest ways that you’re gonna get brand recognition, brand loyalty. That’s kind of how we’ve always approached things. I mean, our CTO has also always been answering our X messages and whatnot. And diving in there and seeing what people do and turning or seeing what people are asking for and turning around new features based on that. It’s the easiest way to deliver, as we call it, a mind-blowing experience, is to actually listen to people where they are. Develop for it, improve the product, and have it done within a, sometimes a couple hours.

Jesse Friedman: That’s very cool. I think that’s one of the greatest things about working with partners or with customers. It’s something that came up for me recently and I think I’ll mention this and then we’ll have to take a break and come back for an episode two here. But one of the things that I find interesting is when I’m working with partners. You know, obviously you hope for everything to be seamless, everything to work really well, and to not have any kind of hiccups. However, I often find that those hiccups are the opportunities that you have to really impress or build loyalty in a partnership or through a customer because it’s how you solve those problems. It’s how you address something that’s going to come up. Obviously we can’t exist in a world of perfection and there’s always gonna be something that’s gonna arrive. But it’s taking that as an opportunity to delight and really show people that you care that can help to ensure a really positive experience. And I think when you translate that to hosting, what you’re saying about going out and meeting people where they are is brilliant. I think that’s fantastic because I think the tendency that people have is that they are a little bit more reserved when they have to go to support, they don’t want to go to support, it has to be a threshold that has to break for them to be willing to reach out to support. They don’t always have faith that they’re gonna get the answers they need right away. So sometimes going to Reddit or to social media is a faster way to get community level support. Maybe a little bit more honest support, but it’s really cool that y’all are meeting your customers there. I think that’s great.

Eddie Barksdale: Yeah, I definitely think like it’s more important our response to when something is difficult or going wrong than whether or not we had it perfect the first time.

Jesse Friedman: Right. Yeah. Very cool. Alright, so we’re gonna take a break here and wrap up episode one. But Eddie, you and I are having such a great conversation. I want to have round two shortly after this. So I’ll see you again shortly.

Eddie Barksdale: Awesome.

Jesse Friedman: Thanks for joining us on another episode of Impressive Hosting, where we uncover the core tenets of great WordPress hosting. Do you have a follow-up question for today’s guest? A thought or comment on anything we talked about? A future guest suggestion? A hosting horror story? What do you think makes great WordPress hosting? All your comments shape the show. Drop them on impressive.host. We also appreciate you following us on social media and subscribing to the podcast on your favorite platform. Finally, do check out our list of open-source projects that need support at impressive.host. Whether it’s code, community, or cash, you can make a difference. See you next time.