I’m currently on the lookout for privacy-respecting domain registrars. What are you guys using and why?
Edit: I’ve registered my domain with Porkbun. I got a really cool one, it’s called reallyaweso.me!
Porkbun
Not kosher and offered best price
Technically Cloudflare has the best prices
Cloudflare locks you in to using their DNS though. I’d rather pay a bit more to avoid vendor lock-in.
Oh boy, I was unaware of the fact that I can’t use my own nameservers with cloudflare. Definitely not going to recommend them anymore
Google Domains because I have a Google account and buying a domain on it was easy when I needed it. I’m still on Google Domains but you’ve reminded me I need to continue the transfer to Cloudflare before I get forced over to Square Space because they don’t support Dynamic DNS.Cloudflare.
Same, Google was easy and as cheap as anyone else. Now Cloudflare
On Google now as well, what was the cutover like to cloudflare?
Transferring was straightforward enough, but there were a couple steps that involved waiting for things to update before you could continue and I forgot to get back to it for a while after they were done. Other than that, all my records seem to have transferred over correctly and all I had to do manually was reconfigure my DDNS client and set up email forwarding with gmail again.
Enterprise tooling (aka a usable API) and it stays out if my way.
Exactly the same boat. But man Cloudflare is better in every way. Having an API to update/fetch records for a zone does wonders.
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Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System ESXi VMWare virtual machine hypervisor IP Internet Protocol VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
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Recently moved over to porkbun after dealing with a couple billing issues with namecheap and not getting the best customer service. Been pretty happy so far.
Do you know if they support Dynamic DNS?
You can use something separate like Zoneedit for the DNS records
I’ve been using Porkbun for over 5 years and haven’t had any issues. I switched from a mix of Google Domains and Namecheap.
So I’m quite new to this, and searching around hasn’t been to clear… if I’m looking to have my own E-mail domain, do I buy a domain in addition to subscribing to an E-mail… service… thing?
Yes, you need to buy (register) a domain beforehand.
The e-mail provider of your choice that provides custom domains will ask you to- either point your domain to their nameservers (done from the domain provider’s panel)
- or insert/update some DNS records on your domain (either from your domain provider’s panel if it is supported or you can link your domain to another DNS service e.g. CloudFlare)
Thank you very much! I’ll look into snagging a domain and setting up like, Bluehost or Proton. I use Proton’s free tier now, but it looks like it’s about 3x as much for their good E-mail plan compared to Bluehost.
What kind of TLD did you buy? Did you choose a TLD that’s supported by the WHOIS privacy? I wanted to see if
alexpewmaster.dewas available, and it told me this:⚠️ PRIVACY WARNING ⚠️ This TLD does not allow WHOIS privacy but generally redacts your personal information. This means that your personal contact information will be sent to the registry but it should not be made public.I have a .de domain with them. No personal info are shown on whois info.
Generally the country based TLDs have that problem. That isn’t unique to porkbun or .de
That’s a really weird way of putting it. EU ccTLDs don’t offer whois privacy because it’s not needed. They have whois privacy built-in as well as very strong privacy laws.
If you want a .de domain I would recommend using inwx.de as registrar they have extremely low prices for .de and often run discounts for the first year as well.
The one thing to keep in mind if you’re not a German citizen and/or not have a German address is that you need to provide one after you register a .de domain. INWX has a service for 3 eur/yr that will provide one on your behalf.
Some other cheap European domains without any requirements and built-in mandatory whois privacy are .be, .nl, .fr and .ro.
Keep in mind that some of these ccTLD don’t allow purchasing multiple years in advance and also force you to reset your leftover term if you transfer.
If you’re gonna get an European ccTLD you should also use an European registrar like INWX or Netim or Gandi. Using an European ccTLD with an American registrar kind of defies the whole point.
I’ve been with Porkbun for over a year now. No complaints.
I moved all of my domains to Porkbun when Google Domains started to close down or become SquareSpace or whatever they were doing.
No complaints so far.
Namecheap because I pay 88 cents a year for my domain.
Which TLD?
(Numbers).xyz
I only use it for stuff for me. If you do a real name it’s more.
Njal.la. They buy the domain for you and let you control it. They also don’t give whois information by default.
Njalla doesn’t seem to be a good option according to this comment on a privacy-focused forum.
Interestingly that is why I chose them like 5 years ago as I figured that is a plus as far as privacy is concerned. Having 1337 show up when performing a domain owner lookup instead of my name seem like a good thing and if I need it to be registered to me it’s easy enough to transfer.
I love the service though and brokep being involved makes them worth considering for anyone into privacy.
Njalla was founded and is ran by Peter Sundee, aka brokep, of Pirate Bay fame… If there’s anyone you can trust …
I would also say this. Njalla is good
No particular reason. They seem pretty alright.
CloudFlare
I figure if I’m already using their proxy, may as well have my domains there as well… one fewer party to trust.
Yup, they don’t mark up prices, they allow you to proxy traffic though them, and they have a WAF that you can set up 5 (I think) firewall rules for your traffic for free.
I’m not super knowledgeable on this, but I chose Dynadot because it’s cheap and WHOIS privacy is included.
Namecheap for registrar and Cloudflare for the name servers. Always keep those services separated so if one dies, you can still get into the other service to fix it.
I was thinking Cloudflare as a registrar and AWS as name servers, but good choice regardless.
Is it possible to do that? Afaik they don’t allow to use different name servers if they’re registrars
I had the domain on a registrar that didn’t allow changing name servers (Tophost for 6 euro per year) and I had to “hop” with ovh for 60 days before having cloudflare for a registrar as they didn’t allow to transfer the domain with different NS
Cloudflare doesn’t allow me to change my name servers? What blasphemy! I had never considered this, I thought it would be allowed by default. Where can I read about this?
I’m looking for a cheap domain registrar with terraform support
It’s the main reason why their domains are so cheap. Their thinking is that since you have to use Cloudflare services to use the domain, you may look at the paid services and decide to pay for one, or suggest it at your workplace.
They charge wholesale price for domains, so they make $0 profit on them. Effectively it’s a loss leader to hook you into the ecosystem. That’s the same reason why VMware ESXi used to be free for home labs - users would become advocates for it and use it professionally.
I’ll paste the comment I made earlier:
Oh boy, I was unaware of the fact that I can’t use my own nameservers with cloudflare. Definitely not going to recommend them anymore
Which registrar do you suggest with good API support? Most of my infrastructure uses Terraform and Salt
I use Porkbun for most of my domains. They appear to have an API but I’ve never tried it: https://porkbun.com/api/json/v3/documentation#DNS Create Record
I’m not familiar with Terraform or Salt but maybe you could try use something like https://github.com/StackExchange/dnscontrol as an abstraction over the DNS provider.
Salt is an alternative to Ansible. However I prefer HashiCorp’s Terraform for day 0 deployments. Unfortunately, PorkBun doesn’t seem to support Terraform, so I’ll keep looking. I’ll take a look at the link you sent, thanks.
Out of curiosity, if you don’t use these IaC tools, how do you manage self-hosted infrastructure?
If a registrar goes out of business, ICANN transfers the domain(s) to another registrar.
If a name server business fails, you change name servers through your registrar.
You can’t really fix registrar services in your name server, nor name server problems through your registrar. (Unless, of course, your registrar is also your name server.)
If your registrar goes down but the NS are on a different provider, the root servers will keep that NS record and all will be well. You can go to a different registrar and transfer it over, but in the meantime it’ll be fine and you can do whatever you need with your DNS.
If the DNS provider goes down, you can go to your registrar and quickly change the NS to another provider. It’ll quickly be back up on your new DNS servers.
Believe me, I’ve done this for 3 decades because one or the other have gone down on me more than once and I’ve had minimal downtime with this separation. Even when I was running my own NS, I kept more than one NS outside my server farm so if my connections went down, I could pop the farm up on a backup colo and point my tertiary accordingly.
After a bit of research, I’m forced by facts (NS records can be cached for an undetermined time) to see what you’re saying. Thank you for teaching me.
The workings are, of course, a bit more complicated than what either of us have said (here’s a taste), but there is a situation as you describe, where separating the registrar from the name servers, and the name servers from the domain, could save the domain from going down.
Well, I kinda simplified it, but yes, the root servers will keep the NS records as long as nothing else updates it (or nobody requests it for longer than the TTL that came with the last lookup) which is why it works.
Happy to help.
Namecheap because cheap
I rent a domain from namesilo
We usually just say that we’re registering a domain name, or renewing the registration.
Renting a domain usually refers to something different entirely. It’s when someone owns a valuable domain name, and someone else pays them a monthly or yearly fee to use it, like renting a house. It’s sometimes done with premium domains that would be very expensive to acquire outright.
Ah, thanks for clearing that up!
Porkbun because it was super easy, one of the cheapest, and has rest good guides for noobs for how to connect various hosting sites (like, using Google sites but owning the domain from porkbun)
Chose Namecheap just for domain and later ionos and their mail service for my 2nd.
+1 for namecheap. I’m happy with them as a registrar. Their support has always been fast and helpful if I have an issue. I use CloudFlare for DNS as they were easier to setup something for dynamic IP.
Same setup for me.
