Self-Hosted Main

do not use .local, as tempting as it may be

use .home personally

RFC 6762 defines the TLDs you can use safely in a local-only context:

*.intranet
*.internal
*.private
*.corp
*.home
*.lan

Be a selfhosting rebel, but stick to the RFCs!

".home.arpa" for A records.

I run my own CA and DNS, and can create vanity TLDs like: a.git, a.webmail, b.sync, etc for internal services. These are CNAMEs pointing to A records.

I use *.mydomain.dev cos I'm a dev... Got it for public access but ended up using locally as well because it's more convenient.

I use .test a lot in my sandbox environments

home.(real domain name)

I can use LetsEncrypt via DNS-01 challenge, if I want to have anything accessible externally but be able to resolve to an internal IP internally then that's a piece of cake to do too as a result.

It.cave :p

In home decided to use .dot because for some reason chrome and chromium based do not automatically redirect it to https ,(at least for now) when you just type in the address in address bar, and do not redirect to search. So much more comfortable... why?.... ok, it maybe break access to all .dot sites but I never see something for me in that zone so so don't care

I use .home as my internal network DNS name. I tend to name my servers and network based off movie-AI stuff; i.e., VIKI, Jarvis, Skynet, Mother, etc.

I have registered domains as well, I am just waiting on my fiber to finally get installed before I start messing wtih DNS records and certs.

I just run (shall we add the word) “proper” split DNS with the same names for anything publicly exposed, internal. And not everything is publicly exposed. It’s just a standard registered TLD.

It’s interesting how few responses here mention this. Why memorize two or more names for the same box/service when DNS easily handles it?

DHCP clients set their own internal DNS names internally or are forced at the DHCP server. Static addresses via MAC as desired.

They also get handed all the usual SRV records and special record types to find services, like the time server and such.

Truly interesting that split DNS isn’t popular amongst the self hosting crowd.

Type the name of the “thing” after setting it up correctly and you’ll be handed an appropriate address to reach it, no matter which of my networks you’re on.

If you’re a dhcp client you’ll have the proper search domain handed right to you too, no need to even type the domain.tld at all. Just the hostname.

I use .home for the Windows domain/internal hosts and .online for my external domain as it was cheap, and the name I wanted was available.

To access self hosted stuff with working SSL certs,.I set up split DNS. On the internal DNS sever, I have a forward lookup zone for the .online domain with static A records for .online and all the subdomains pointing at the internal address of a caddy reverse proxy.

Not sure this is what you want but I have a .one domain setup with local IPs.
So if one server is on 192.168.1.8 I point the domain to that and by visiting https://myserver.whatever.one I get to that server.

I don't self host much of anything in everyday life, but when I'm working on a LAN related project I always use .local. Android now supports MDNS, so I use it pretty much everywhere.

Technically every machine is supposed to have a registered TLD, even on a local network. That said, I use .lan

I mean.... I use xtremeownage.com

But, ya know... I own it. Although, I use a few subdomains for my home-network, with a split-horizon DNS setup.

If you want to avoid problems, use TLD that are assigned for this purpose, for example .home.arpa or .home or .lan or .private etc.

Avoid using .local because its already used by mDNS.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special-use_domain_name

.uk, but it is an actual .uk that I've registered.

I just use my domain inside my network which is a .net

.local is mDNS - and I'm using that, saves me so much hassle with split-horizon issues etc.

I also use global DNS for local servers (AAAA records on my own domain), again, this eliminates split-horizon issues. Life is too short to deal with the hassle of running your own DNS server.

I Just use a .de tld and for all my sites a *.mysite.mydomain.de.

Ssl certs from cloudflare with a dns challenge for internal use.

*.oob.mydomain.tld

Nothing. I have all devices using tailscale DNS and I refer to things in my network by their host name directly.

I have a registered domain and my lan domain is "int.registereddomain.com". This way I can use letsencrypt etc for my internal hosts (*.int.registereddomain.com via dns challenge). The actual dns for my internal domain itself is not public but static records in pihole.

.damo

.com lol. I got a 6 letter domain that makes for me. I should check out .local though. I could .com for my website and .local for my home network using the same domain name.

I own lastname.me and lastname.dev and everything public is lastname.me and everything local ist lastname.dev. I don't have a VPS anymore so the .me domain is a bit useless and only relevant for emails these days but I'd have something like nc.lastname.me for my public next cloud instance and docs.lastname.dev for my paperless instance that I don't want to have on somebody else's machine.

maybe not directly answer for you, but I just literally bought 4 domains for 3 euro per year (renews at the same price!) 5 minutes ago :D.

The catch - it has to be 9 numbers.xyz (see https://gen.xyz/1111b for details).

lastname. systems

I used to own lastname.cloud and foolishly let that expire. Its one of my biggest regrets.

I use .lan for anything local and my public domain is .net for anything publicly hosted.

i have owned a .com since 1997. i use that.

I had problems with .local because it’s used for MDNS and too lazy to figure out how that works so now I just use lan but I also own a .com domain so I have started to use that more

everything under *.home.mydomain.tld is reserved for internal use.

I've got a .com for my internal only services with tls and a .pro for my external facing services. I could probably throw them all on one but because legacy (I didn't think things through) I have two

.app is suuuper cheap even for three letter domains. I picked one up for pennies with three letters that mean something to me and my partner and use a pair of redundanct piholes to serve local DNS for that domain. Externally it’s hosted on DigitalOcean for stuff I want external.

I've never used DNS in my local network (because it's additional burden to support, so I tried to avoid it), but couple of month ago when I needed several internal web-sites on standard http port, I've just came up with "localdomain."

Yep, it's non-standard too, but probability of it's usage of gTLD is lowest among all other variants because of it's usage in Unix world and how non-pretty it is :)

I use homelab..org

I use a custom domain for everything....email, internal dns, external (cf tunnels), and my public websites. I use to use AWS Route 53 for everything because of work, but moved to CF because it's free and much easier to setup and manage.

For local devices I use *.local.domaingoeshere.com (wildcart cert), issued by cloudlfare. In retrospec I should have used *.int.domain.com as it would be less typing...but everything is categorized and bookmarked anyway.

GDI, I have been using internal.registereddomain.com which is 5 wasted characters...

I have an io domain - mylastname.io

AD domain is home.mylastname.io

A place I put most apps running on my Kubernetes cluster is *.apps.mylastname.io

A customer of mine chose for his own domains.. and it was his mistake that he wanted specific "cool top level domains" in his network for his factory, storage facility and vehicles on the road that connected with wifi at home.

He decided, and I realized immediately that this would be a bad idea (*cough* .. no I didn't.. but lets pretend I did), that he wanted something that looked like;

• company.fabriek (fabrication)
• company.waren (warehousing)
• company.vrachtwagen (trucks)

I think he adopted the idea because I had a singular setup at my office/shop where my synology, placed in a 8U rack in the back on the 4th flloor with a hostname.. just a hostname "I.am.on.the.forth.floor.in.the.back". Just a singular name.. I remember him laughing when he found the server where the hostname said it was.

So, the systems (electronic toolbag for in the trucks) installed in the trucks would only work a 100% if connected to the wifi at home base. All interfaces with any relation to the outside world had to be brought within the lan to be able to get to warehouse data, and the fabrication department (his pride and joy) just did what it always did.. it fabricated stuff. All choices were made motivated by the path of least resistance.

Yeah.. a lot of stuff didn't work as planned. Mainly connectivity things that did not work as expected, misconfiguration of DHCP servers, VPN clients and all other types of "employee owned" gear that were unable to resolve the funky domains.

I started to protest, and explain why what I did was funny, but what he was doing was foolish.. especially after I gave him a rough idea of what was neede to be done. I proposed a split dns solution with a real domain, even that would have been easier and less intrusive to work on or fix things in for sure.. but it looked "less cool" according to his lordship. Customer is king is a stupid concept, but if the customer claims to be King, his highness can pay for the time required to serve him.

So..

Pick a singular host, get a real domain and setup a split DNS environment (easiest and funnest imo).. but if you don't care (and why should you :)) pick something fun and cool that makes sense to use for you. All our suggestions are pure personal preference in the end :)

I own both mydomain.com as well as mydomain.me. I use the *.me as my local domain and *.com for the real world.

I own both `mydomain.com` and `mydomain.net`, and the `.net` is all my internal services (eg `homeassistant.mydomain.net`). The public `.com` domain I use exclusively for email and a static site.

I had some old employer with a similar segmentation so it just made sense to me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯