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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 8 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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[–] 3 points 8 months ago (4 children)

I have my domain with Cloudflare too, and at this point, I’m not aware of these DNS servers. Can someone explain it a bit? I know what DNS is, but I don’t understand what’s the use case for having them elsewhere. I’m not to argue, just didn’t know where to register a domain, so I went with them. I’m concerned with the future of the domain either, but don’t understand the issues at this early point.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    The DNS authoratative servers are what hold all of the records for your domain. With Cloudflare, you are stuck with theirs. As for why you want to use a different one, maybe you need more than the 200 records Cloudflare limits you to. Maybe you don't like the way their API works for automating updates. Maybe you don't want to set up all of your records all over again if you transfer your domain to another registrar. Maybe you just don't like Cloudflare.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    Thanks! It’s a bit more clear now.

    To contribute to the discussion, I remembered that with Squarespace (my previous registrar), I had unlimited redirects, which I used heavily. I am not really sure about the unlimited part, perhaps that was hidden somewhere in the interface, and they have limits, and I just never saw them. But I remember Cloudflare communicated I have like 10, so I decided to not use it for nice-to-have but not really needed things. E.g. I used a subdomain for a blog, and created redirects for typical misprints in my name. Was handy, but not really needed. I should have document this, but I was too busy at the time, and now, almost a year later, I don’t really remember. There were differences with Cloudflare and Squarespace.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Here is a somewhat simplified explanation

    When you are registering a domain you are essentially just creating a NS record:

    mydomain.com NS

    Then when a resolver is asked a question like what is the A record for myserver.com it goes and asks the tld server (.com) what is the NS record for mydomain.com. the tld then responds with the nameserver ip. Then the resolver will query the nameserver directly for the A record of mydomain.com

    In practice there is a ton of caching going on here, but that's the broad strokes

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