Availability lookups
Use Porkbun as the WHMCS domain search provider: registry-accurate answers, 25 domains per API call, and why premium and unanswered domains are handled the way they are.
The module can answer the domain search on your website itself, asking the registries through Porkbun rather than relying on WHOIS.
Turning it on
Configuration → System Settings → Domain Registrars (or Domain Pricing, depending on your WHMCS version) → Lookup Provider, and choose Porkbun.
It is opt-in. Installing the module does not change how your domain search behaves until you select it here.
Why bother
WHOIS lookups are unreliable for availability. Rate limits, inconsistent response formats between registries, and registries that have restricted WHOIS entirely all produce searches that fail or return nothing. A registry check through the registrar answers the question directly.
It is fast across many TLDs. Lookups go out 25 domains per API call, and the bulk endpoint has its own budget — 200 domains per minute — separate from the 10-checks-per-10-seconds limit on one-at-a-time checks. A search across 30 extensions is two API calls, not thirty.
It knows about premium names, which WHOIS cannot detect at all.
How results are mapped
| Porkbun says | WHMCS shows |
|---|---|
| Available | Available to register |
| Not available | Already registered |
| Available, but premium | Unavailable |
| Not a checkable domain / unsupported TLD | TLD not supported |
| No answer from the registry | Omitted from the results |
Why premium domains show as unavailable
The Porkbun API cannot register, renew or transfer premium domains. This is a Porkbun restriction, not a module one.
If the search returned a premium domain with a price, a customer could order it, pay for it, and the registration would then fail at the registrar with the money already taken. Showing it as unavailable prevents that.
Registration and transfer also refuse premium names up front, before the customer is charged, in case one reaches an order another way.
If you want to sell premium domains, handle them in the Porkbun dashboard and invoice manually.
Why unanswered domains are omitted
Registries occasionally do not respond in time. Porkbun reports these separately from “available” and “taken”, because they are neither.
The module retries them once. If there is still no answer, the domain is left out of the results entirely and a note is written to the module log.
That is the only honest option. Reporting it as registered loses a sale; reporting it as available takes an order that cannot be filled.
Pricing in search results
Prices shown next to search results come from your WHMCS TLD pricing, not from this lookup. That is how WHMCS works — availability and pricing are separate concerns.
Keeping that pricing current is what the automatic pricing sync is for.
Rate limits
The bulk endpoint allows 200 domains per 60 seconds per account, counted per domain rather than per request. A search across 20 TLDs spends 20 of that budget.
That is ample for a normal site. A search page offering 50 extensions to a busy audience could approach it, in which case reduce the number of TLDs shown by default in your domain search settings.
A handful of registries cap how many names they will accept in one command — .de accepts one at a time — so a batch weighted towards those is split automatically rather than left to time out.