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.
I have entirely too many domains at namesilo.com. Privacy is included for free in the majority of circumstances – not for .org. .com renewals for me are down to $8.85 year because of the aforemented “too many.” I also have some .social and other newer TLDs and those are stupidly expensive.
I use nothing else from namesilo. For domains I use I don’t even use their nameservers. But for what I need, their UI is sometimes awful, but it does what I need.
Namesilo used to be the standard for inexpensive domain registration. They keep raising their rates, however, and now they are expensive compared to the alternatives. Being a registrar takes next to no work. Do not accept expensive registrars. You can safely avoid Namesilo.
Not the cheapest, but I quite like Njalla.
I paid $12 (USD) for a .in and $32 for a .nu with Namecheap, $20 (AUD) for a .au and $59 for a .email with VentraIP.
I can’t really recommend Namecheap though because you can’t count on getting support if you need it. A couple of years back I needed to change my account email with them due to Google being an arse and locking me out of my primary gmail account (namecheap required an email code to log in to the domain dashboard but I couldn’t view the email), put a support ticket in while logged into the same account in their support portal and they ignored me for close on a month. At that point I managed to get back into the gmail account so didn’t need their help anymore, I sent Namecheap back a message saying I was unhappy with their lack of help. About six months later they sent their one and only reply to my ticket, basically saying they were sorry I was unhappy but they didn’t see a problem with the time they took.
I must admit I still have domains with Namecheap because sometimes it’s just hard to get around to changing things, but I was reminded of their lack of competence literally this morning. They sent me an email saying I needed to update my domain contact info so I logged in and went to change it only to find their contact update form is broken and won’t submit…
VentraIP hasn’t given me any issues so far with either their domain or email hosting but I haven’t had to rely on their support so I can’t say how good they are with that.
I paid $10.44 USD to cloudflare last year in May for a year of my .com domain. I have no complaints.
I’m paying about $22 on Porkbun, they’re pretty good
I have a .com for like $19.99 but pay to have my info redacted from whois stuff, an email address, all cones to like $42.99
I have a bullshit domain with some nonsense tld and domain name that I pay $0.99/yr for that’s on a vps I pay like $150/yr for all told (it’s doing stuff).
All told I keep it below $20/month.
I have a .com for like $19.99 but pay to have my info redacted from whois stuff, an email address, all cones to like $42.99
Porkbun charges $11.08 for a .com with whois privacy. $30/year for email hosting might be worth it if you’re getting very good service, but I think you’re overpaying.
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 Just transfered over to porkbun after namecheap decided to raise renewal cost again, wish id done it sooner.
Porkbun is goated
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 will make a prediction. Once you get the domain and set it up, the images will still not work. Are you using an external proxy? I was battling this for days, Lemmy backend refused to create thumbs for my local images, federated content worked great. IF you get this issue, send me a message, I found a workaround.
Don’t remember the cost, but namecheap is not a lie. It’s cheap, hazzle free, and overall a great service. I have quite a few domains with them.
Same. And you can pay years in advance.
Sadly, they just got bought out by a big, stupid VC firm. Only time will tell what effect that’ll have on their day-to-day operations, but it does make me nervous. Not nervous enough to switch just yet, though.
I use two: Namecheap and omg.lol.
Admittedly omg.lol isn’t a traditional registrar, but they do give you a domain name and other stuff (I don’t use most of it), but it’s $20/yr
Namecheap varies, but last I checked it was a bit cheaper. Not by much, maybe $15/yr for my .monster domain?
I got an .org domain from hover.com for $16/yr. They knock $5 off for the first year. They price domains based on popularity of the tld so that can get expensive. Whois privacy is standard and you can buy additional add-ons
I’ve think Cloudflare just sells them at the price they pay even if they don’t do the first year promo like NameCheap does
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.
Iirc Cloudflare sells domain names at cost.
