Domain names seem expensive in comparison. The cheaper VPS that I use for playing around is just $10.29/year.
I thought I’d get a domain name from RackNerd as well, but they’re $24.95/year + I think $4.99 for privacy.
I’ve checked Namecheap, and that seemed great, until I found that renewal prices are often through the roof.
I don’t really care about it being nice. For now, mostly I just want to use the VPS as image host for Lemmy, since Imgur and Catbox are both a bit problematic.
And without a domain name, the images only show as link posts in the default LemmyUI (though it seems to work elsewhere). Plus it makes migration impossible.
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!