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!
OVH because cheap enough for me, europe based and reliable.
Namesilo, cheap and never had issues
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!
Cloudflare for support (tooling), Njal.la for privacy (run by the pirate bay founder), porkbun for a happy medium and for the cool kids.
I use Hostpoint.
They were recommended by Protonmail, and meet my privacy concerns.
+1 for Hostpoint. All my servers are in Switzerland as well.
name.com. I don’t remember why I picked them, but they do no BS and the service is fine.
Easydns.ca, no privacy issues. Nothing about me personally in the who’s db (.net tld)
Cloudflare, because my understanding is that they typically renew at basically cost, and that’s where most of my other DNS stuff is anyway.
I typically buy domains at whatever registrar is cheapest at the time for initial purchase, which most recently was namecheap IIRC.
I’m interested in your “other DNS stuff”
Likely a bad description. I more meant DNS, page rules, tunnels, zero trust logins, and more. It’s honestly just easier to keep it all in one place, and to be honest they are one of the more reliable sources for… literally all of those things.
Hmm, do you have all of this described somewhere? This sounds like a great setup
Nah, it’s just stuff I set up as needed.
The page rules are basic, one redirects to an Etsy shop, another to serve images for email from a cdn, and another for handling QR codes.
Tunnels are set up for subdomains to reach internal network stuff, with a Cloudflare Zero Trust login which prompts for those that don’t have secure logins.
The DNS stuff is subdomains, email records, and a few records for certain game servers.
I also use cloudflare to monitor my DKIM rejections, though my email is through mxroute as they have/had a lifetime option and I don’t like subscriptions.
There are a few different sites as well, one is personal, one is for public facing stuff, a couple for side businesses.
It’s honestly just easier to keep as much together as possible.
Was on Namesilo. No complaints, save for the slow website. Changed to porkburn because it was a bit cheaper.
GDRP and anonymous hosting. Pretty great.
If you don’t have domains with TLDs that Gandi charges 3x-6x more than you can get elsewhere… then yeah, their registrar and DNS services are pretty nice.
Gandi did something in the last year or two that made me migrate off them. Don’t remember what it was but it was a deal breaker.
Edit: found it further down in the thread. They even migrated to porkbun like I did! https://lemmy.world/comment/8536944
Their pricing structure doesn’t affect what I have hosted and I’m selfhosting email in dockermail. My whois is still anonymized how I like.
+1 for Gandi, as they also have an API for management as well and support ACME DNS challenge for Let’s encrypt.
I stick with the big name registrars and then just use the cheapest for that TLD.
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 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.
Gen.xyz
