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.
Free dns and everything it’s been great. Cheap domains and even the 404 page is cute
+1 for Porkbun. They even offer $2/yr
<6–9 digit>.xyzdomains if you just want a domain for basically free and don’t care about having a nice and pretty one. 01384629.xyz or whatever for $2/yr to give their service a try is well worth it imo. I have one of these as well as a “real” domain I like that’s like $20 or $25/yr. I have no complaints with Porkbun.They are good for dynamic ips too
I can’t believe oicu812.xyz is available.
Good Marketing and branding always gets me more interested. Porkbun is awesome
Porkbun is pretty solid
I got a .cc domain at Porkbun for about $35 for 10 years. That was the best deal I could find.
Don’t use namecheap.
Super happy with PorkBun
Came here to find this comment. Happy with pork bun for a couple of years
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 $18.
I recommend transfering to Cloudfare, since they have guaranteed wholesale price (no added fees, and only what the tld owner and ICANN asks), so they should be cheapest (since anything less is selling at a loss for the registrar, at least ifI understand right).
Namecheap has started overcharging me like 20+$ on a renewal compared to CF. So, transfering after a first year (which is where registrars like Namecheap take a loss and give you a discount) is probably the cheapest way how to go about it.
My name registration with porkbun is cheap enough that I don’t remember exactly. Had no issues with them.
$11.08 for a .com. Source: just renewed.
@Zak @nymnympseudonym buy as much as you can as .com is increasing again this year and next.
Cloudflare sells domains at wholesale prices. Domains are not their business model, they want people to be exposed to their services so you might pay for something they do make money on.
I use cloudflare for both my domains. $17 or so each.
Honestly you can spend as little as a couple bucks if you dont care about a name. I like cloudflare but almost any registrar is fine as long as you pay for the domain.
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 IP Internet Protocol NAT Network Address Translation VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
[Thread #1017 for this comm, first seen 24th Jan 2026, 08:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Wait here are you getting a $10/year VPS?
From a deal on racknerdtracker.com (so RackNerd as the name suggests).
But their panel is a bit limited. If you want a custom OS that isn’t provided, you have to open a ticket with them to get an ISO mounted. You can also boot into recovery environment, but that is outdated minimal installation of Debian 9 without working APT. I was still able to use it to install Arch Linux from bootstrap image though. I just had to decompress it on my PC, create a temporary partition for it and scp it over.And I am again mentioning Arch. It comes naturally.
Seriously, my ISP (XMission - local and fucking awesome) charges $27/mo minimum for a VPS
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’ve been using Njalla for a year using Monero and haven’t had any issues with them. Although I haven’t got anything up worth putting down.
The people complaining could’ve been putting very bad stuff on their sites. Or not, and Njalla just bend to DMCA!
I tried many only to settle on cloudflare. The other services were poor or in some cases weird (like infomaniak wanting me to upload my ID). Cloudflare had good prices and the service is stable, no surprises + whois privacy included.
I pay 0.04 USD per day with NamesCheap privacy included.
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 use Cloudflare as registrar, and I am currently paying for 2 .com and 1 .co domains, US$100 each for 10 years.
I bought a class 1.111B domain from the .xyz registrar: 6 to 9 digits followed by .xyz, so you can use your phone number. They sell them for $1/year, and $1/year for whois privacy. So I paid $20 to have my domain for the next decade :)
