Domain names seem expensive in comparison. The cheaper VPS that I use for playing around is just $10.29/year.
I thought I’d get a domain name from RackNerd as well, but they’re $24.95/year + I think $4.99 for privacy.
I’ve checked Namecheap, and that seemed great, until I found that renewal prices are often through the roof.
I don’t really care about it being nice. For now, mostly I just want to use the VPS as image host for Lemmy, since Imgur and Catbox are both a bit problematic.
And without a domain name, the images only show as link posts in the default LemmyUI (though it seems to work elsewhere). Plus it makes migration impossible.
Free dns and everything it’s been great. Cheap domains and even the 404 page is cute
+1 for Porkbun. They even offer $2/yr
<6–9 digit>.xyzdomains if you just want a domain for basically free and don’t care about having a nice and pretty one. 01384629.xyz or whatever for $2/yr to give their service a try is well worth it imo. I have one of these as well as a “real” domain I like that’s like $20 or $25/yr. I have no complaints with Porkbun.They are good for dynamic ips too
I can’t believe oicu812.xyz is available.
Good Marketing and branding always gets me more interested. Porkbun is awesome
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters CF CloudFlare DNS Domain Name Service/System IP Internet Protocol NAT Network Address Translation VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
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I’ve got a few domains. I use Porkbun as registrar. They’re awesome, and the domains were pretty cheap. Under $10 a year each.
I’ve been on Namecheap for years.
The “hard no” list is GoDaddy, Network Solutions, and anything owned by EIG. They are literally the worst. Probably Ionos (formerly 1&1) too.
Namecheap is going downhills recently… They were sold to a private equity on September, .com starts at $18.
I recommend transfering to Cloudfare, since they have guaranteed wholesale price (no added fees, and only what the tld owner and ICANN asks), so they should be cheapest (since anything less is selling at a loss for the registrar, at least ifI understand right).
Namecheap has started overcharging me like 20+$ on a renewal compared to CF. So, transfering after a first year (which is where registrars like Namecheap take a loss and give you a discount) is probably the cheapest way how to go about it.
Don’t use namecheap.
Super happy with PorkBun
Came here to find this comment. Happy with pork bun for a couple of years
I have two domains through Cloudflare. They don’t mark up to price at all, so they’re basically the lowest price you’ll find that isn’t a gimmick.
I pay $6.50 for one and $10.46 for the other. Privacy is free and by default.
No harm in getting your domain from them. Just beware that when you create a DNS entry, they default to proxying the incoming connections. It is super easy to turn that “feature” off, you just have to remember to do it whenever you create a new record.
This is my strategy as well. Except, I will find the domain on sale elsewhere then transfer it over to CloudFlare.
I use cloudflare for both my domains. $17 or so each.
Honestly you can spend as little as a couple bucks if you dont care about a name. I like cloudflare but almost any registrar is fine as long as you pay for the domain.
Find the best prices for domain names here, from registration to renewal an transfer: https://tld-list.com/
Privacy should be free and by default.
Thanks a lot :)
Wait here are you getting a $10/year VPS?
From a deal on racknerdtracker.com (so RackNerd as the name suggests).
But their panel is a bit limited. If you want a custom OS that isn’t provided, you have to open a ticket with them to get an ISO mounted. You can also boot into recovery environment, but that is outdated minimal installation of Debian 9 without working APT. I was still able to use it to install Arch Linux from bootstrap image though. I just had to decompress it on my PC, create a temporary partition for it and scp it over.And I am again mentioning Arch. It comes naturally.
Seriously, my ISP (XMission - local and fucking awesome) charges $27/mo minimum for a VPS
I Just transfered over to porkbun after namecheap decided to raise renewal cost again, wish id done it sooner.
Porkbun is goated
I tried many only to settle on cloudflare. The other services were poor or in some cases weird (like infomaniak wanting me to upload my ID). Cloudflare had good prices and the service is stable, no surprises + whois privacy included.
A .com domain should be under USD $12 a year with WHOIS privacy included. If someone is charging more than that, they are ripping you off. Most web or VPS hosts will charge a significant markup if they sell domains. Make sure you check the renewal price too. Some registrars will give you the first year cheap, then charge significantly more to renew it.
Cloudflare is the cheapest, but they force you to use their DNS servers. Porkbun is a dollar more, but you can use your own DNS if you want to.
I have my domain with Cloudflare too, and at this point, I’m not aware of these DNS servers. Can someone explain it a bit? I know what DNS is, but I don’t understand what’s the use case for having them elsewhere. I’m not to argue, just didn’t know where to register a domain, so I went with them. I’m concerned with the future of the domain either, but don’t understand the issues at this early point.
The DNS authoratative servers are what hold all of the records for your domain. With Cloudflare, you are stuck with theirs. As for why you want to use a different one, maybe you need more than the 200 records Cloudflare limits you to. Maybe you don’t like the way their API works for automating updates. Maybe you don’t want to set up all of your records all over again if you transfer your domain to another registrar. Maybe you just don’t like Cloudflare.
Thanks! It’s a bit more clear now.
To contribute to the discussion, I remembered that with Squarespace (my previous registrar), I had unlimited redirects, which I used heavily. I am not really sure about the unlimited part, perhaps that was hidden somewhere in the interface, and they have limits, and I just never saw them. But I remember Cloudflare communicated I have like 10, so I decided to not use it for nice-to-have but not really needed things. E.g. I used a subdomain for a blog, and created redirects for typical misprints in my name. Was handy, but not really needed. I should have document this, but I was too busy at the time, and now, almost a year later, I don’t really remember. There were differences with Cloudflare and Squarespace.
Here is a somewhat simplified explanation
When you are registering a domain you are essentially just creating a NS record:
mydomain.com NS <nameserver ip or name>
Then when a resolver is asked a question like what is the A record for myserver.com it goes and asks the tld server (.com) what is the NS record for mydomain.com. the tld then responds with the nameserver ip. Then the resolver will query the nameserver directly for the A record of mydomain.com
In practice there is a ton of caching going on here, but that’s the broad strokes
Thanks! I haven’t thought of com as being the real TLD, actually!
I generally get stuff from porkbun.com since I’ve been there for a while, prices are decent and they have some convenient features. But, I should try namecrane.com since they are run by online buddies of mine. They are sort of a spin-off of the original buyvm.net.
Price comparator: https://tld-list.com/
Yes they separate out renewal prices so make sure to take that into consideration. The high renewal prices are a marketing trick of the TLD holders. The resellers can’t really do anything about them.
A fantastic resource, thanks for posting this!
Cloudflare offers at-cost domain names. There’s a lot of issues with using them though. Since they’re so big, they have a culture of giving governments/oligarchs whatever they want.
There is Njalla, owned by someone involved with The Pirate Bay. It supposedly allows users to buy domain names privately, although I’m not sure at what cost. I’ve read users saying that Njalla will revoke domain names if pressured by outside forces, so they don’t seem like a good option similar to cloudflare.
The DNS is a tool of surveillance and control and we should move away from it as quickly as possible.
I’ve been using Njalla for a year using Monero and haven’t had any issues with them. Although I haven’t got anything up worth putting down.
The people complaining could’ve been putting very bad stuff on their sites. Or not, and Njalla just bend to DMCA!
Cloudflare sells domains at wholesale prices. Domains are not their business model, they want people to be exposed to their services so you might pay for something they do make money on.
