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
Good Marketing and branding always gets me more interested. Porkbun is awesome
Porkbun is pretty solid
I got a .cc domain at Porkbun for about $35 for 10 years. That was the best deal I could find.
Beyond just the registrar you pick, try not to pick some vanity TLDs. The ubiquitous ones (e.g. .com and .net) are fine. For example .xyz has a bad reputation (due to its initial low price to register, it became used for many spammers) and might be blocked in unexpected places. Others might lure you in with a cheap first year but charge much higher for subsequent years.
In addition to that, ccTLDs (country code) can be a wildcard, especially if you don’t live in the region served by it. Although rare, the country registry can seize your domain. Most commonly though, many, including .us, do not allow you to mask your personal information (WHOIS privacy). I’ve had a .me for a long time and even though they haven’t been much of a problem, they are also raising the price for renewal faster than an equivalent .com, and so I’ve been thinking of letting that domain go.
If you trust your country’s ccTLD registry and they’re reputable, that’s less of an issue, however.
As far as I know, Cloudfare is the only registrar that offers you wholesale price, as in the price asked by the tld owners. So, you a registrar can’t go lower, because that’s what they pay for it.
But, a lot of registrars will give you first year at a heavy discount (so, at a loss), just so they can ramp up the price to wholesale + a lot extra. I got my domain for like 5$, and they then asked for 40$ for renewal, while wholesale is around 25$.
So, I just transfered to Cloudfare for the renewal. Tbh I don’t remember if it was the first or second year, and what are the transfer rules, but I think it should be possible to just buy a first year at heavy discount with i.e Namecheap or something, and immediately transfer to Cloudfare for the first renewal at wholesale price.
I use mythic beasts. They are not the very cheapest, but they offer predictable pricing and just charge a fixed increase compared to the price they pay their supplier. You can trust that they won’t mess around with the renewal price or arbitrary extra fees.
For my .org domains I pay ~£15 per year, but if you don’t care about the tld, you can get some for ~£6 per year (the costs on the website exclude VAT, but if you buy multiple years at a time, the amortised cost including VAT ~= the price excluding VAT).
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.
My name registration with porkbun is cheap enough that I don’t remember exactly. Had no issues with them.
$11.08 for a .com. Source: just renewed.
@Zak @nymnympseudonym buy as much as you can as .com is increasing again this year and next.
I’ve been on Namecheap for years.
The “hard no” list is GoDaddy, Network Solutions, and anything owned by EIG. They are literally the worst. Probably Ionos (formerly 1&1) too.
I recommend transfering to Cloudfare, since they have guaranteed wholesale price (no added fees, and only what the tld owner and ICANN asks), so they should be cheapest (since anything less is selling at a loss for the registrar, at least ifI understand right).
Namecheap has started overcharging me like 20+$ 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.
Namecheap is going downhills recently… They were sold to a private equity on September, .com starts at $18.
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!
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
My first registrar was Google domains. As always, they killed the business. And sold it to Squarespace. I’ve been their customer for a year or two, nothing bad I can say, except the price was about 1.5 or even 2x of that from Cloudflare for com domain, so I migrated there. I have no deep understanding of the nuances, so I cannot say whether Cloudflare is a bad actor. At least I trust them to not elevate the price, as it’s not their primary business, sell domains.
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.
On CloudFlare, user224.com renews annually at less than $11
That’s where I got my domain (I was using them at the time, but it doesn’t matter), for that price, and that includes whois privacy.
It’s worth noting that if Cloudflare is your Registrar, you must also use them as your authoritative DNS provider. It’s not bad necessarily, it’s just a little unusual.
I see that, but what does it mean in practice?
That means you can’t host your own dns or have some other commercial provider do dns resolution for you. Typically the registration and dns service are two distinct things.
Cloudflare will control and see your DNS traffic unless you switch the registration to a new company. Right now you would pay $11/yr for registration and $0/yr for DNS service. They could change that $0/yr to something else.
It’s only noteworthy because it deviates from the norm. For some reason they really want to handle your traffic.
Can you explain this DNS thing further, please?
I start with what I understand. DNS stands for domains name system, which means a huge database of domain names and their IP addresses. When I ask for a website, DNS tells my computer / browser which IP addresses to look for, to reach the website.
At home, I have Pi-Hole and Unbound. The first one censors DNS addresses by not including domains that serve advertisements. It can work with various DNS providers, including those from Google or Cloudflare. Unbound allows me to self-host DNS database, periodically fetching it from somewhere. That way my ISP may not see … here I’m not sure what, DNS lookups? It sees which IPs I reach, so I assume there’s no big difference, if they’d want to know which resources I reach for. Frankly, I don’t understand this solution entirely, perhaps unbound is for something different. I used Pi-Hole without it for years, only recently I added unbound, because it was quite easy to do with DietPi distro.
Cloudflare actively promotes their WARP service, for people to use their DNS servers. They have three options, four ones, three ones and two, three ones and three. My guess is they theoretically can analyse these DNS lookups for some reason. (E.g. by partnering with three letter agencies, doing some service for them.)
What is DNS in the context of my website being registered with them? When I reach to my website, or any other website registered with them, what would happen? Isn’t the record everywhere already? I cannot understand what this means in this (different, isn’t it?) context.
The rug pull scheme ‘now you pay us for DNS too!’ seems unlikely, for some reason. If it’s no different from what they provide as a free service. If it’s something else, I assume you can migrate to any other registrar, unless you’re too heavy into their ecosystem.
On a personal note, I’m not too heavy into their ecosystem, I hope. I have a couple of static websites hosted for free with Cloudflare Pages. Plus I have a bare metal file server with images which is shared to the internet with Cloudflare Tunnel. I’m nobody with a few readers, tens of posts and hundreds of images, and I chose this architecture because I don’t understand how to properly self-host my blog on a residential connection (meaning dynamic IP behind a CG-NAT or what it’s called). When I do, I may drop them in favour of a simpler architecture. But also I was curious how it works.
So, saying all this, I still don’t understand what this them being an authoritative registrar means in this context. Perhaps I lack some web dev skills to understand that properly. When I had my domain with Squarespace, they allowed more than Cloudflare, but I lack understanding to properly formulate that, to even understand what it was. I think I could host my top level domain with Cloudflare Pages only when they are my registrar, while having those Pages on a subdomain was trivial even with a different registrar. If I remember that correctly now, I might’ve been confusing some things here.
Thanks for your previous explanation, it was quite informative.
If you are planning on using Cloudflare for any other aspect, I wouldn’t hesitate to use them for DNS. They are a good option and among the most affordable.
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.
I use Cloudflare as registrar, and I am currently paying for 2 .com and 1 .co domains, US$100 each for 10 years.
