Selfhosted

Porkbun is pretty solid

My name registration with porkbun is cheap enough that I don't remember exactly. Had no issues with them.

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've got a few domains. I use Porkbun as registrar. They're awesome, and the domains were pretty cheap. Under $10 a year each.

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.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.

[Thread #1017 for this comm, first seen 24th Jan 2026, 08:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

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 Just transfered over to porkbun after namecheap decided to raise renewal cost again, wish id done it sooner.

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.

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.

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.

Porkbun.com

Free dns and everything it's been great. Cheap domains and even the 404 page is cute

I'm paying about $22 on Porkbun, they're pretty good

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.

Don't use namecheap.

Super happy with PorkBun

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Namecheap has random number only xyz domains for like a dollar so I have one of those.

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

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

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.

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 :)

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.