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’m paying about $22 on Porkbun, they’re pretty good
Some will let you pay for up to 10 years at the 1 year price, so if you get a deal on a particular tld (as long as it’s not an abused one like .xyz) you can pay upfront and save a decent amount of money.
From memory you should try and avoid 10 year renewals since you can’t transfer to a new registrar for the first year of the new renewal.
You’ll probably want WHOIS privacy support, so make sure the tld supports it.
I’m using ovh for my domains, it’s €13.5 I think for a .com renewal and that include whois privacy, a 15Go mail address and a 100mo website hosting.
I paid $10.44 USD to cloudflare last year in May for a year of my .com domain. I have no complaints.
Nearly Free Speech https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/domains
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
Porkbun is pretty solid
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I Just transfered over to porkbun after namecheap decided to raise renewal cost again, wish id done it sooner.
Porkbun is goated
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! Now 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 namecheap domain (.net) is around 15 USD annually, with basic privacy protection included
