I'm currently using namecheap to buy cheap domains, I know they are not necessarily cheap in long term, but first year + coupons make them almost free
But now I've got some domains I don't want to just use one year, and it gives pretty much a lot of issues with pricing and privacy
So please, people, share services you use, and tell me whether they are private and/or cheap and/or have all those countless generic domains and not just .com .org .net
Porkbun is sort of the darling of the self hosting community. I settled on them after doing a huge comparison of prices and features of all the different registrars available to me. Porkbun was by far the best.
Well... their free services remain free regardless of your registrar. Still, I don't really mind supporting them given how useful they have been even in just the free tier.
Yea poorly worded, I meant that the free services would kick in directly rather than having to mess with nameservers and crap like I used to do whenever I bought a domain on Google lmao
For something cheap, my vote goes to name cheap. Their support was actually better than I expected too. For something private njalla is really good. Not sure what's a good mix of both though, maybe CloudFlare? I know you can move your domain to them, so I presume they also let you register directly through them.
Namecheap is a quality service for sure and Iāve used them myself, but theyāre only cheap to buy. They really stick it to you when itās time to renew.
I mostly use CloudFlare registrar since I'm already using them for my job. They don't have first year promo or anything like that, but they sell all domains at cost price and it integrates nicely with their other services. Sadly it does not support .ca domains yet but it does support lots of TLDs.
Thereās a vocal handful group of people disliking CloudFlare because of their irrelevant āprivacyā concern here ā you can absolutely use the registrar without using their CDN features. Also, reality check: with CloudFlareās market reach, thereās zero chance nothing they do online isnāt already MITMāed already. Having said that, Cloudflare uses their registrar as loss leader, so they give their wholesale price to end users registering, and as such youāll have the cheapest price available for the domain extensions they support. You can then just set your DNS without their orange cloud and traffic on your domain arenāt going to flow through their CDN.
So they profit from high-profile commercial users to subsidize the free tier (proxy, tunnels) and cheap DNS. What's wrong with that? It's not like we absolutely need those (proxy is nice but you can use vps, tunnels are also offered by ngrok).
there are lots of cheap domain registrar options but if you're looking for a cheap .com I always go for cloudflare, they also offer .org for pretty cheap and many other options as well. The domains other than the common ones are pretty decently priced as well. I migrated all my domains there last year and it's really simple, integrates with their DNS really well and payment is pretty streamlined.
I would stick with namecheap (for now) and pony up for a multi year registration. If in 5 or 10 years they are jacking the price up then you can use another registrars cheap port option to get a discount. I did this recently between godaddy and namecheap. I had one domain left with godaddy that I have owned for over probably a couple of decades at this point and they were seriously jacking the rate up on me, I ported it to namecheap for a massive discount.
With Google domains transferring to Squarespace I'll be transferring my one remaining domain with them to something else soon enough.
I already moved all of my other domains over to a local provider I use for work that has treated me well, but this one last google domain address has my self hosted services on it and I was using some features that I didn't want to have to transfer so I kept it with google. I was using their ddns service too but my IP is now sticky (effectively static but can change in some rare circumstances) and it has only changed once in the last 3 years so I think I'll just manually manage the A records if needed until I either go fully static or use a third party ddns provider. I also use email aliasing to use me@mydomain with gmail.