Selfhosted

I'm using ovh for my domains, it's €13.5 I think for a .com renewal and that include whois privacy, a 15Go mail address and a 100mo website hosting.

I paid $10.44 USD to cloudflare last year in May for a year of my .com domain. I have no complaints.

As far as I know, Cloudfare is the only registrar that offers you wholesale price, as in the price asked by the tld owners. So, you a registrar can't go lower, because that's what they pay for it.

But, a lot of registrars will give you first year at a heavy discount (so, at a loss), just so they can ramp up the price to wholesale + a lot extra. I got my domain for like 5$, and they then asked for 40$ for renewal, while wholesale is around 25$.

So, I just transfered to Cloudfare for the renewal. Tbh I don't remember if it was the first or second year, and what are the transfer rules, but I think it should be possible to just buy a first year at heavy discount with i.e Namecheap or something, and immediately transfer to Cloudfare for the first renewal at wholesale price.

My first registrar was Google domains. As always, they killed the business. And sold it to Squarespace. I’ve been their customer for a year or two, nothing bad I can say, except the price was about 1.5 or even 2x of that from Cloudflare for com domain, so I migrated there. I have no deep understanding of the nuances, so I cannot say whether Cloudflare is a bad actor. At least I trust them to not elevate the price, as it’s not their primary business, sell domains.

I am not renting a VPS from them (only domain registration, an e-mailadres and whois privacy), but have you looked into the offerings from Infomaniak? Mind you, things like the TLD influence the price a lot (reg and/or renewal), and hosting related services can increase costs as well.

I use two: Namecheap and omg.lol.

Admittedly omg.lol isn't a traditional registrar, but they do give you a domain name and other stuff (I don't use most of it), but it's $20/yr

Namecheap varies, but last I checked it was a bit cheaper. Not by much, maybe $15/yr for my .monster domain?

Nearly Free Speech https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/domains

If you’re at all into credit card churning Amex business gold has a new $150 square space credit that can be used for domains. You can prepay for up to 10 years. Their rates are high ($20 for .com) but it’s fake money.

On CloudFlare, user224.com renews annually at less than $11

That's where I got my domain (I was using them at the time, but it doesn't matter), for that price, and that includes whois privacy.

I use mythic beasts. They are not the very cheapest, but they offer predictable pricing and just charge a fixed increase compared to the price they pay their supplier. You can trust that they won't mess around with the renewal price or arbitrary extra fees.

For my .org domains I pay ~£15 per year, but if you don't care about the tld, you can get some for ~£6 per year (the costs on the website exclude VAT, but if you buy multiple years at a time, the amortised cost including VAT ~= the price excluding VAT).

Beyond just the registrar you pick, try not to pick some vanity TLDs. The ubiquitous ones (e.g. .com and .net) are fine. For example .xyz has a bad reputation (due to its initial low price to register, it became used for many spammers) and might be blocked in unexpected places. Others might lure you in with a cheap first year but charge much higher for subsequent years.

In addition to that, ccTLDs (country code) can be a wildcard, especially if you don’t live in the region served by it. Although rare, the country registry can seize your domain. Most commonly though, many, including .us, do not allow you to mask your personal information (WHOIS privacy). I’ve had a .me for a long time and even though they haven’t been much of a problem, they are also raising the price for renewal faster than an equivalent .com, and so I’ve been thinking of letting that domain go.

If you trust your country’s ccTLD registry and they’re reputable, that’s less of an issue, however.

Don't remember the cost, but namecheap is not a lie. It's cheap, hazzle free, and overall a great service. I have quite a few domains with them.

Dunno your region, but Registro.br's domains are rather cheap imo. However, I need to check again, but afaik it's only for people with CPF or CNPJ, the Brazilian equivalents of person and company identification numbers.

You can just use a DuckDNS domain if it's just for personal use and you are not planning to use it as a brand name.

I paid $12 (USD) for a .in and $32 for a .nu with Namecheap, $20 (AUD) for a .au and $59 for a .email with VentraIP.

I can't really recommend Namecheap though because you can't count on getting support if you need it. A couple of years back I needed to change my account email with them due to Google being an arse and locking me out of my primary gmail account (namecheap required an email code to log in to the domain dashboard but I couldn't view the email), put a support ticket in while logged into the same account in their support portal and they ignored me for close on a month. At that point I managed to get back into the gmail account so didn't need their help anymore, I sent Namecheap back a message saying I was unhappy with their lack of help. About six months later they sent their one and only reply to my ticket, basically saying they were sorry I was unhappy but they didn't see a problem with the time they took.

I must admit I still have domains with Namecheap because sometimes it's just hard to get around to changing things, but I was reminded of their lack of competence literally this morning. They sent me an email saying I needed to update my domain contact info so I logged in and went to change it only to find their contact update form is broken and won't submit...

VentraIP hasn't given me any issues so far with either their domain or email hosting but I haven't had to rely on their support so I can't say how good they are with that.

I've think Cloudflare just sells them at the price they pay even if they don't do the first year promo like NameCheap does

I have entirely too many domains at namesilo.com. Privacy is included for free in the majority of circumstances -- not for .org. .com renewals for me are down to $8.85 year because of the aforemented "too many." I also have some .social and other newer TLDs and those are stupidly expensive.

I use nothing else from namesilo. For domains I use I don't even use their nameservers. But for what I need, their UI is sometimes awful, but it does what I need.

Some will let you pay for up to 10 years at the 1 year price, so if you get a deal on a particular tld (as long as it's not an abused one like .xyz) you can pay upfront and save a decent amount of money.

From memory you should try and avoid 10 year renewals since you can't transfer to a new registrar for the first year of the new renewal.

You'll probably want WHOIS privacy support, so make sure the tld supports it.

Hover.com is my favorite. Good prices and no shenanigans.

I got an .org domain from hover.com for $16/yr. They knock $5 off for the first year. They price domains based on popularity of the tld so that can get expensive. Whois privacy is standard and you can buy additional add-ons

I have a 9-digit .xyz domain through cloudflare and I think I pay like ~~$1-2~~ $0.87 a year for it

$24.95/yr seems high. Are you looking at a specialty TLD? I paid around 10 USD/yr for a .com with Cloudflare, and 12 CAD/yr for a .ca with Canspace.

My namecheap domain (.net) is around 15 USD annually, with basic privacy protection included

What website do you get your VPS from?

I have a .com for like $19.99 but pay to have my info redacted from whois stuff, an email address, all cones to like $42.99

I have a bullshit domain with some nonsense tld and domain name that I pay $0.99/yr for that's on a vps I pay like $150/yr for all told (it's doing stuff).

All told I keep it below $20/month.

I've got one through name.com and I pay I think $15/year for. Not really sure what extra features I'm getting, I don't do much with it.

https://njal.la/

Not the cheapest, but I quite like Njalla.