Does Porkbun Provide Ownership Certificates?
You may be asked by different institutions (like banks, government agencies, or service providers) to provide an ownership certificate to verify that you are the legal owner of a domain name.
Typically, these documents need to include:
- The domain name
- Registrant information (Full name and contact details)
- Registration/Purchase Date
- Registrar information
At Porkbun, we do not provide an official domain ownership "Certificate". However, there are other ways you can verify this within your Porkbun account.
Invoice PDF
This is the document we recommend using if you're needing to verify ownership with agencies that do not offer DNS validation.
These invoices cover most of the bases that these agencies are looking for:
- Sold To/Buyer information
- Domain name
- Purchase date
- Registrar details
Note:
Invoice information directly pertains to the account details you have listed on your Settings/Billing page. If you need to have an invoice that designates a specific business name or VAT number, this can be added on your account settings page and this will be added to any previous and future invoices
Click here to view our handy guide on generating invoices and downloading the PDF.
DNS Verification
Most service providers (like web hosting companies) will give you a TXT record to add to the domain. This can be added in the DNS to verify ownership with their platform
Here is an example from Google to verify ownership for Google Sites:
The Road Less Traveled: Disable WHOIS Privacy
Warning
Following these steps will result in your registrant data being publicly visible. Your data will likely be harvested and you are guaranteed to be endlessly spammed via email or phone calls (or worse, unsolicited magazine subscriptions).
We only recommend this as a last resort if DNS validation is not available and the invoice did not suffice for verification (although, it may be worth checking what other information they need before doing this. Our support team can assist you in providing the needed information).
Note
Not all TLDs support publishing WHOIS information. Many ccTLDs automatically redact registrant data for WHOIS searches regardless of the option selected on the registrar (Porkbun) side.
To make your WHOIS data public:
It may take some time for this update to take effect on the domain. In some cases, WHOIS searches outside of Porkbun may result in the following message:
"Please query the RDDS service of the Registrar of Record"
This means the lookup will need to be done through Porkbun's WHOIS service in order to populate the results. You can find this in our footer under TOOLS > RDAP (WHOIS), or by going to porkbun.com/whois in your browser.
Still Not Enough?
If none of these options suffice for the service requesting ownership verification, please reach out to our support team with details regarding the service request and what information they're needing. We're happy to help any time!