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If you have one, how much do you pay for a domain name? Any cheap registrar recommendations? (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 5 points 9 months ago* (5 children)

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.

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    I see that, but what does it mean in practice?

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 child)

    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.

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