Posted: 5/25/2026 1:25:46 PM EDT
| What the title says. Suggestions for the company to purchase from? |
Protecting privacy will come at a cost. Use encrypted email (Proton), messaging (Signal), and password manager (KeepassXC). Use a vetted VPN only!, Social media is mind poison.
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I've done a bunch from namecheap. They seem to be consistently the cheapest. I think across the board, all the registrars have extra shitty user interfaces. And watch out, cause they will let you register one for like $4/yr for 5 years. Then when your website explodes and gets a ton of traffic, they want to charge you $3k/yr to renew. 
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This intrigues me. Why can't one go on the internet and make their own domain. Why do we have to buy the rights from someone who doesn't even own it, and then pay for it year after year? Or are we simply paying for space on their server. Would it be different if I had my own server? |
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Namesilo is also decent. If you have workloads you plan to host in a cloud, however, it is often advantageous to use that cloud as the registrar, so their deployment scripts can modify the domain records directly as necessary. But that's usually more expensive. AWS charges 50 cents a month for each domain hosted zone, while those other registrars often host domain records at no charge. |
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Originally Posted By bmarshall1: This intrigues me. Why can't one go on the internet and make their own domain. Why do we have to buy the rights from someone who doesn't even own it, and then pay for it year after year? Or are we simply paying for space on their server. Would it be different if I had my own server? You're not really buying rights, you're buying security and administration work. "Owning" a domain is basically having a record at one of the registrars that points to your designated name server for that domain, which then will tell people the IP address of whatever you're putting on the internet. There's no reason you couldn't create your own naming system that does the same thing without a fee, and that's been done -- the trick is convincing everyone to use your "new" system for name lookups. Part of what you're paying for is an agreed-upon system where some rando can't just decide he likes your domain name and starts pointing at his servers and causes the internet to break into bits depending on who's DNS everyone believes is right. If you wanted, though, you personally could go into your hosts file and point whitehouse.gov at your own servers, and in your little bit of anarchy that would work and you'd "own" whitehouse.gov. |
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Originally Posted By seek2: Namecheap is my go to as well. I've also done auction/direct buy purchases of existing domains through them and it was very easy. I have three, the first one since 2003. I've been with Namecheap for about 10 years with no problems. |
But he sure found out the hard way
That dreams don't always come true
That dreams don't always come true
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Originally Posted By Poppadent: Godaddy is good for being easy to work with. They have great customer service but they keep raising renewal prices Namecheap is good as well GoDaddy tried to deplatform ARFCOM. |
I sell firearms produced by the finest child labor in the world, be it Filipino, Muslim, Mormon, Arizonan, or Texan.
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I have mine through Cloudflare but Namecheap is also an option. My advice is don't search for domains until you are ready to buy, and get as many years upfront as you can. Years and years ago I searched for my last name .com and went to buy it a week later. It went from like $12/year to over $2000 to "buy" it. What some companies do is buy domains people search for and then hold them hostage. I found out the company that was listed as owning the domain also owns the registrar I used to search which was hover.com. At the time I didn't know a lot about how it works but heard of them from a podcast I listened to. As someone else also mentioned if you use your domain for a website and it gets popular they will try to blackmail you into paying a ton of money for renewals. The ones I use for my own personal use like email are still cheap but it would be different if I were using it for commercial purposes and it was used to make good money. ICANN is who oversees domains. The registrar is the middle man and they have a lot of leeway on how to run things. I have heard a lot of horror stories with GoDaddy and they tried fucking around with this site before. |
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Originally Posted By Rebel31: I have mine through Cloudflare but Namecheap is also an option. My advice is don't search for domains until you are ready to buy, and get as many years upfront as you can. Years and years ago I searched for my last name .com and went to buy it a week later. It went from like $12/year to over $2000 to "buy" it. What some companies do is buy domains people search for and then hold them hostage. I found out the company that was listed as owning the domain also owns the registrar I used to search which was hover.com. At the time I didn't know a lot about how it works but heard of them from a podcast I listened to. As someone else also mentioned if you use your domain for a website and it gets popular they will try to blackmail you into paying a ton of money for renewals. The ones I use for my own personal use like email are still cheap but it would be different if I were using it for commercial purposes and it was used to make good money. ICANN is who oversees domains. The registrar is the middle man and they have a lot of leeway on how to run things. I have heard a lot of horror stories with GoDaddy and they tried fucking around with this site before. Using ICANN to check for availability is probably safe, given I doubt they attempt to exploit the entered searches. But I agree with your main point - when you find one that is available, head over to your preferred commercial registrar's site, search for it, and register it. Right then. Not tomorrow. Not in half an hour. Be this crew:  The Town - The-Not-F*cking-Around-Crew |
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Related question, sorry to intrude on OP's thread, but maybe he wants my question answered too. Who do I want for email hosting for my domain name? I'm tired of everything I send through HostGator's servers getting flagged as spam, and I'm beyond fed up with HostGator blocking some of my incoming emails. (not putting them in the spam box, but bouncing them) |
Exposure to views that distress and offend is a form of education unto itself. -U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Reges v Cauce
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Originally Posted By backbencher: GoDaddy tried to deplatform ARFCOM. Originally Posted By backbencher: Originally Posted By Poppadent: Godaddy is good for being easy to work with. They have great customer service but they keep raising renewal prices Namecheap is good as well GoDaddy tried to deplatform ARFCOM. Never forget. |
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Originally Posted By PepePewPew: Related question, sorry to intrude on OP's thread, but maybe he wants my question answered too. Who do I want for email hosting for my domain name? I'm tired of everything I send through HostGator's servers getting flagged as spam, and I'm beyond fed up with HostGator blocking some of my incoming emails. (not putting them in the spam box, but bouncing them) The big players - I've been happy with Google Workspaces for my primary domain, but that's due in no small part to being grandfathered under the free plan, since I signed up ~20 years ago. For new users, it's something like $7 a month per user for the full suite of Google Workspace apps, including Gmail, supporting up to 30 email addresses per user. Granted, many folks will think that's not worth the cost, and others will not want to use Google for privacy reasons, but if you do, it's a powerful suite of applications. There are also free options to pseudo-host email with Google, using Cloudflare, but it's a bit hacky. Microsoft no longer supports setting up custom domains for M365 personal. They now require some version of M365 business or enterprise, so that's out for most folks. GoDaddy is an option, but hardly the best, and yeah, it's GoDaddy, so probably not. I don't have experience with self-hosting or the free options, although many seem to like Proton. |
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Originally Posted By PepePewPew: Related question, sorry to intrude on OP's thread, but maybe he wants my question answered too. Who do I want for email hosting for my domain name? I'm tired of everything I send through HostGator's servers getting flagged as spam, and I'm beyond fed up with HostGator blocking some of my incoming emails. (not putting them in the spam box, but bouncing them) I use Microsoft 365 Business but that's mainly because I want to run my own tenet and mess around with stuff to learn. A lot of businesses use M365 and I can test things out on my own personal stuff instead of someone's production environment. I have a Business Premium license for the Entra license + some other stuff. I put my wife on a Business Basics license which is email and cloud stuff which I think is about $5/mo. Others that are good options depending on what you want- Google Workspace is like having a Google account but there are some catches. You cannot setup family sharing like you can with a consumer account. Some products are under the Workspace TOS and some are still consumer products. You'd have to look at the different pricing tiers for each license. The other thing is that Workspace does not let you pick and choose what licenses each person gets which kind of sucks. You can't buy services like Google One as a Workspace user. YouTube Premium is available. If you like Proton and how they do things you can use custom domains with them. Fastmail is a good option privacy and cost wise. I used them for a while. I think it was like $5/user and I actually read their TOS which may or may not be important to some people. If you're paying for email it should be private and not monetized like most free consumer email is. |
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Originally Posted By scuba_steve: The big players - I've been happy with Google Workspaces for my primary domain, but that's due in no small part to being grandfathered under the free plan, since I signed up ~20 years ago. For new users, it's something like $7 a month per user for the full suite of Google Workspace apps, including Gmail, supporting up to 30 email addresses per user. Granted, many folks will think that's not worth the cost, and others will not want to use Google for privacy reasons, but if you do, it's a powerful suite of applications. There are also free options to pseudo-host email with Google, using Cloudflare, but it's a bit hacky. Microsoft no longer supports setting up custom domains for M365 personal. They now require some version of M365 business or enterprise, so that's out for most folks. GoDaddy is an option, but hardly the best, and yeah, it's GoDaddy, so probably not. I don't have experience with self-hosting or the free options, although many seem to like Proton. Originally Posted By scuba_steve: Originally Posted By PepePewPew: Related question, sorry to intrude on OP's thread, but maybe he wants my question answered too. Who do I want for email hosting for my domain name? I'm tired of everything I send through HostGator's servers getting flagged as spam, and I'm beyond fed up with HostGator blocking some of my incoming emails. (not putting them in the spam box, but bouncing them) The big players - I've been happy with Google Workspaces for my primary domain, but that's due in no small part to being grandfathered under the free plan, since I signed up ~20 years ago. For new users, it's something like $7 a month per user for the full suite of Google Workspace apps, including Gmail, supporting up to 30 email addresses per user. Granted, many folks will think that's not worth the cost, and others will not want to use Google for privacy reasons, but if you do, it's a powerful suite of applications. There are also free options to pseudo-host email with Google, using Cloudflare, but it's a bit hacky. Microsoft no longer supports setting up custom domains for M365 personal. They now require some version of M365 business or enterprise, so that's out for most folks. GoDaddy is an option, but hardly the best, and yeah, it's GoDaddy, so probably not. I don't have experience with self-hosting or the free options, although many seem to like Proton. MS changed the custom domain rules because people were using consumer accounts to run businesses from which is against their TOS. Business accounts are as cheap as like $5/mo for email + 1TB OneDrive + Cloud Office so there isn't some big cost savings. That reminds me that Apple iCloud+ also does custom email domains for people who are all in on Apple stuff. |
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Originally Posted By PepePewPew: Related question, sorry to intrude on OP's thread, but maybe he wants my question answered too. Who do I want for email hosting for my domain name? I'm tired of everything I send through HostGator's servers getting flagged as spam, and I'm beyond fed up with HostGator blocking some of my incoming emails. (not putting them in the spam box, but bouncing them) I use protonmail and it works well. Namecheap is the registrar. Proton works fine with it. |
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I found out there is this Swiss company that does free email hosting for one email address or you can pay for more but it's not that expensive. Infomaniak kSuite https://www.infomaniak.com/en/ksuite |
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I am currently moving all of my domains from GoDaddy to Spaceship. Mostly because I only use them to register the domains and never need any of the other services any registrars offer (I have my own webservers, email, dns, etc). I'm moving because I have just under 200 domains. I had GoDaddy for decades due to their easy use and phone support - however last summer I got a notification that some of my domains auto-renewed. No biggie, they're all set to auto-renew. But I happened to also find an email from them saying one of my products had not been able to renew due to the payment option (CC) not being valid. The product that 'failed' to renew, was their bulk domain club membership, which if you have I think 20 or more domains, is a hell of a deal as it lowers the renewal rates down to $8/yr. You pay for it annually though, so that's why there is a break even point of the number of domains that makes it worth it. Well, that product - and ONLY that one - failed to renew due to an INVALID credit card. The very same credit card they continued to renew all of my domains at $22/yr with. Now is it on me that I didn't catch that failed renewal for a few months? Sure. I made GoDaddy emails go to a folder in my inbox because it's all just noise that just tracks activity in my account but very little changes ever happen. I had been renewing domains at the higher rate for several months before I saw this, and only because I actually opened a domain renewal and noticed the higher rate. I had been overcharged about $650 over those past few months. So I called their customer service and told them of this issue, and asked for a refund. They were very adament that they could not give me a refund since the fees they charge are "regulatory fees by ICANN". If you look at the itemized bills, $0.20 per domain per year goes to ICANN, the rest is profit/cost for the registrar. I explained this, and showed them their own break down and said the itemized bill THEY SEND must be mistaken, and no refunds were possible. I figured I would meet them in the middle - fine. Give me a credit for the overpayment amount and I'll continue to renew my domains from that until it's used up, and we hit the 'break even' point and we're all back on track. They said due to 'regulatory rules' they could not give me a credit, with their own company, to let me recoup the overspend that THEY say was caused by an invalid credit card. Which I'll add at this point I went back and found out was used 3x that same day by them - once for the bulk discount club, which failed, and twice for domain renewals at the higher price after that expired - and both of which went through NO PROBLEM. In my most calm and polite professional voice I said, fine. You can @#$% right off then, bye. I then transferred all domains renewing within 90 days to NameCheap immediately. About a month later I found Spaceship which is a spin off company of NC, and they charge even less... I'm not, without any gimmicks or other spend, renewing domains at the $8 or less per year amount. Every time GoDaddy tells me something is up for renewal in the next 30 days... I go transfer EVERYTHING that expires in the next 30 days over to Spaceship. I'm going to end up saving $300 a year over and above the BEST price GoDaddy was giving me before. Spaceship. That's the way forward for me, 1000%. Also, if you have a domain that is important, like my main network domain, or names of family members, or my dog's website... I keep them paid about 10 years in advance. I've lost a few over the years when I was broke and couldn't renew in time... so when I have the cash, I protect the ones that are valuable. TL;DR: DO NOT USE GODADDY - Use NameCheap or their spin-off SPACESHIP(dot)COM which is where I am currently migrating my ~150 domains now. If you can use your own nameserver and other services, then registrar is ONLY about pricing and payment shenanigans if they pull them. |
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I use Namecheap. Do NOT use Godaddy. My personal domains were originally with them but I transferred to Namecheap when they went woke and started deplatforming/censoring conservatives. I still have to use Godaddy for work. Namecheap's web site is 10x faster and easier to navigate than Godaddy's bloated and unintuitive UI. |
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I went with cloudfare, yes I hate that company but whatever. $12/y is cheaper than a meal at McDs. I tried the shopify cart but work has me working 12 hour shifts now so that I will have to wait. |
Protecting privacy will come at a cost. Use encrypted email (Proton), messaging (Signal), and password manager (KeepassXC). Use a vetted VPN only!, Social media is mind poison.
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Originally Posted By bmarshall1: This intrigues me. Why can't one go on the internet and make their own domain. Why do we have to buy the rights from someone who doesn't even own it, and then pay for it year after year? Or are we simply paying for space on their server. Would it be different if I had my own server? They all have to work together to make sure you don't use "mydomain.com" and then someone else tries to use "mydomain.com". Which one is legit? Which one should I route internet traffic to? There needs to be a registry, so that domains don't get split like that. While it might be possible to do something yourself, there's probably a lot of verification and such that would make it a bit too cumbersome. Thus you buy/register a domain with a registrar. They register it with the top level domain, and then it can be routed via DNS properly. |
Now she's making $15 an hour as a 'tard wrangler with a degree in women's studies... - tommytrauma
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Originally Posted By Kokodude: I use Amazon for domain registration. It's cheap and makes it easier to use if you're deploying something in AWS. I use them for a couple domains as well, and no doubt, it makes it very easy to integrate with their services (which is why I have them there), but you do end up paying for aspects of Route 53 that are often free with other providers/registrars. The sites I have there are low volume, so I am just paying $0.50 monthly for each domain for a hosted zone, but it is a nice integration with Amplify. Of course, some months can be surprisingly expensive: 
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cloudflare or namecheap. Stay away from porkbun - they have odd anti-bot that will trip at the drop of a hat, locking you out of your domain without a scan of a government id. Stay away from godaddy - they dropped arfcom and constantly have small and large abuses of power. Stay away from small places, as a general rule - they play all kinds of weird games. |