I pay 0.04 USD per day with NamesCheap privacy included.
Selfhosted
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Porkbun.com
Free dns and everything it's been great. Cheap domains and even the 404 page is cute
+1 for Porkbun. They even offer $2/yr <6–9 digit>.xyz domains if you just want a domain for basically free and don't care about having a nice and pretty one. 01384629.xyz or whatever for $2/yr to give their service a try is well worth it imo. I have one of these as well as a "real" domain I like that's like $20 or $25/yr. I have no complaints with Porkbun.
They are good for dynamic ips too
Good Marketing and branding always gets me more interested. Porkbun is awesome
I use cloudflare for both my domains. $17 or so each.
Honestly you can spend as little as a couple bucks if you dont care about a name. I like cloudflare but almost any registrar is fine as long as you pay for the domain.
I use Cloudflare as registrar, and I am currently paying for 2 .com and 1 .co domains, US$100 each for 10 years.
Wait here are you getting a $10/year VPS?
From a deal on racknerdtracker.com (so RackNerd as the name suggests).
But their panel is a bit limited. If you want a custom OS that isn't provided, you have to open a ticket with them to get an ISO mounted. You can also boot into recovery environment, but that is outdated minimal installation of Debian 9 without working APT. I was still able to use it to install Arch Linux from bootstrap image though. I just had to decompress it on my PC, create a temporary partition for it and scp it over.
And I am again mentioning Arch. It comes naturally.
Seriously, my ISP (XMission - local and fucking awesome) charges $27/mo minimum for a VPS
Formerly Google domains, now owned by squarespace. It costs $13 a year for a .rocks domain.
https://www.loopia.com/ - ~10 euro/year for only DNS and ~100 euro/year for DNS, e-mail and web hosting.
I bought a class 1.111B domain from the .xyz registrar: 6 to 9 digits followed by .xyz, so you can use your phone number. They sell them for $1/year, and $1/year for whois privacy. So I paid $20 to have my domain for the next decade :)
Cloudflare. They sell and renew at cost ($12 iirc)
I hear Porkbun does/did as well but I haven't looked in a long time.
Don't use namecheap.
Super happy with PorkBun
Came here to find this comment. Happy with pork bun for a couple of years
Cloudflare sells domains at wholesale prices. Domains are not their business model, they want people to be exposed to their services so you might pay for something they do make money on.
I did buy a 10 letter(not random) .cc domain on Namecheap 30€ for the next decade.
I tried many only to settle on cloudflare. The other services were poor or in some cases weird (like infomaniak wanting me to upload my ID). Cloudflare had good prices and the service is stable, no surprises + whois privacy included.
Namecheap has random number only xyz domains for like a dollar so I have one of those.
Porkbun is pretty solid
been using them since i dropped duckdns and they've been great. self hosted ddns options for porkbun too
I have two domains through Cloudflare. They don't mark up to price at all, so they're basically the lowest price you'll find that isn't a gimmick.
I pay $6.50 for one and $10.46 for the other. Privacy is free and by default.
No harm in getting your domain from them. Just beware that when you create a DNS entry, they default to proxying the incoming connections. It is super easy to turn that "feature" off, you just have to remember to do it whenever you create a new record.
This is my strategy as well. Except, I will find the domain on sale elsewhere then transfer it over to CloudFlare.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| CF | CloudFlare |
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| IP | Internet Protocol |
| NAT | Network Address Translation |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.
[Thread #1017 for this comm, first seen 24th Jan 2026, 08:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
My name registration with porkbun is cheap enough that I don't remember exactly. Had no issues with them.
$11.08 for a .com. Source: just renewed.
I've got a few domains. I use Porkbun as registrar. They're awesome, and the domains were pretty cheap. Under $10 a year each.
Find the best prices for domain names here, from registration to renewal an transfer: https://tld-list.com/
Privacy should be free and by default.
Cloudflare offers at-cost domain names. There's a lot of issues with using them though. Since they're so big, they have a culture of giving governments/oligarchs whatever they want.
There is Njalla, owned by someone involved with The Pirate Bay. It supposedly allows users to buy domain names privately, although I'm not sure at what cost. I've read users saying that Njalla will revoke domain names if pressured by outside forces, so they don't seem like a good option similar to cloudflare.
The DNS is a tool of surveillance and control and we should move away from it as quickly as possible.
I've been using Njalla for a year using Monero and haven't had any issues with them. Although I haven't got anything up worth putting down.
The people complaining could've been putting very bad stuff on their sites. Or not, and Njalla just bend to DMCA!
Cloudflare has been excellent for me since I switched away from (puke) GoDaddy years ago. They don't try to upsell you bullshit like most of the other places, either. I have three domains with them.
I do not use any other Cloudflare services. There are no additional costs or services required (beyond the domain fees) to use them as your registrar.
I don’t have a big problem with CloudFlare (and use their service myself for some things). But so much of the internet infrastructure is already consolidated with them. There are so many good options for domain registrars. Let’s spread things around a bit.
@lukecyca @CarbonatedPastaSauce problem is I thought I spread stuff around but pork in uses their nameservers.
I've been on Namecheap for years.
The "hard no" list is GoDaddy, Network Solutions, and anything owned by EIG. They are literally the worst. Probably Ionos (formerly 1&1) too.
Namecheap is going downhills recently.... They were sold to a private equity on September, .com starts at $18.
I recommend transfering to Cloudfare, since they have guaranteed wholesale price (no added fees, and only what the tld owner and ICANN asks), so they should be cheapest (since anything less is selling at a loss for the registrar, at least ifI understand right).
Namecheap has started overcharging me like 20+$ on a renewal compared to CF. So, transfering after a first year (which is where registrars like Namecheap take a loss and give you a discount) is probably the cheapest way how to go about it.
I'm paying about $22 on Porkbun, they're pretty good
I Just transfered over to porkbun after namecheap decided to raise renewal cost again, wish id done it sooner.
Porkbun is goated
I generally get stuff from porkbun.com since I've been there for a while, prices are decent and they have some convenient features. But, I should try namecrane.com since they are run by online buddies of mine. They are sort of a spin-off of the original buyvm.net.
Price comparator: https://tld-list.com/
Yes they separate out renewal prices so make sure to take that into consideration. The high renewal prices are a marketing trick of the TLD holders. The resellers can't really do anything about them.
I will make a prediction. Once you get the domain and set it up, the images will still not work. Are you using an external proxy? I was battling this for days, Lemmy backend refused to create thumbs for my local images, federated content worked great. IF you get this issue, send me a message, I found a workaround.
A .com domain should be under USD $12 a year with WHOIS privacy included. If someone is charging more than that, they are ripping you off. Most web or VPS hosts will charge a significant markup if they sell domains. Make sure you check the renewal price too. Some registrars will give you the first year cheap, then charge significantly more to renew it.
Cloudflare is the cheapest, but they force you to use their DNS servers. Porkbun is a dollar more, but you can use your own DNS if you want to.