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 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
If you’re at all into credit card churning Amex business gold has a new $150 square space credit that can be used for domains. You can prepay for up to 10 years. Their rates are high ($20 for .com) but it’s fake money.
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 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.
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.
Dunno your region, but Registro.br’s domains are rather cheap imo. However, I need to check again, but afaik it’s only for people with CPF or CNPJ, the Brazilian equivalents of person and company identification numbers.
What website do you get your VPS from?
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 VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.
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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’m paying about $22 on Porkbun, they’re pretty good
I paid $10.44 USD to cloudflare last year in May for a year of my .com domain. I have no complaints.
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’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.
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.
Nearly Free Speech https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/domains
