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.
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.