What's the cheapest domain you can register for 10 years?

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2022/09/whats-the-cheapest-domain-you-can-register-for-10-years/

by modinfo • 4 years ago

246 269 4 years ago

I'd really like to see 'forever' domain registration.

Pay your fee once, and the domain stays active forever.

The cost of running the servers for a top level domain are really small, and probably going down with time, so it should be possible for the domain registrar to keep operations going with just a trickle of new registrations.

As a compromise, perhaps you could charge a nominal fee for domain name ownership transfers.

RedShift12• 4 years ago

What happens when you die?

noisy_boy2• 4 years ago

One can start with "forever" being, say, 125 years (Wikipedia says that the longest lived person recorded was slightly over 120). So domain expiry date=current date+125-current age. When human beings routinely start living longer than that, it can be revised.

politelemon• 4 years ago

I'd say nothing, it continues to stay in my name and cannot be registered by anyone else, ever. The domain hosting service may disappear, and that's fine too.

arinlen6• 4 years ago

Pay your fee once, and the domain stays active forever.

Beyond domain squatters, who would benefit from that?

londons_explore2• 4 years ago

It's part of the solution for a zero maintenance web presence.

It means I could maybe publish my memoirs and family tree and have it still available in 500 years.

It also makes web domains like other property - you don't purchase a nice watch and then expect it to be reassigned to someone else if you don't pay your annual watch renewals.

CodesInChaos• 4 years ago

I don't see how squatters would benefit more from that than other people registering domains. If anything I'd expect them to prefer a recurring fee over a high upfront fee.

grumbel• 4 years ago

Require the domain name to be a UUID or include the date or something else that makes it unsquattable. The domain being actually forever is far more important than it being pretty. Most people will use a search engine for lookup anyway, but it's the forever domain name that is a first step in preventing links from getting broken.

That said, this is not something I expect to happen in the regular Web, this seems to be a job for IPFS, blockchain or whatever. With plain HTTP, even if you have your forever domain, you'd still have the issue that the webserver it is pointing to can change, break or just disappear.

forgotpwd164• 4 years ago

As those domains will be expensive compared to common ones since it's expected you'll be paying the equivalent of a number of renewal years, squatting will be a much more expensive business to do.

saargrin• 4 years ago

i would like to have a permanent email for example .. a service for which i now pay godaddy though they dont actually do anything other than DNS

MerelyMortal• 4 years ago

Limit it to one per real person (not oganization etc)

geysersam• 4 years ago

Yes please, that'd be amazing. However, it would be good to have some kind of system to weed out unused domains for other uses. Otherwise I imagine we'd have lots of occupied but abandoned domain names.

IYasha2• 4 years ago

OpenNIC

forgotpwd164• 4 years ago

This reminds me, Epik markets a 'forever' domain registration. Not what you're asking though as they just renew a domain perpetually so depends on domain operator remaining active (as well as Epik itself).

octoberfranklin2• 4 years ago

Yeah, and I'd like to have a driver's license that will never expire.

But neither of these things will ever happen, for approximately the same reason.

UncleEntity2• 4 years ago

In Arizona driver’s licenses are good until you’re 65 which effectively, if you’re a particularly bad driver and die in a horrific crash between 16 and 65, never expires.

smileybarry4• 4 years ago

It would have to be regulated to some degree to prevent extreme squatting, e.g.: one domain per ID would be a good start. Maybe one that isn’t a trademark too? Sort of paving the way for a name/pseudonym domain to be registered this way.

masukomi• 4 years ago

I believe that the owners of a custom TLD (like amazon's .pay) have to pay ICANN every year to keep that TLD alive. I believe it's over $100k annually.

as such, a forever registration would have to be a quasi-pyramid scheme where the initial users keep their domains only so long as there are more new users coming in each year than existed in all the past years combined (or something similar depending on charges).

also, what good is a forever domain when it doesn't also have forever hosting? You die, the domain continues on forever, your hosting provider stops hosting and now no-one else can ever use that domain. Kind-of a jerk move in the end.

quintushoratius3• 4 years ago

You die, the domain continues on forever, your hosting provider stops hosting and now no-one else can ever use that domain.

So not that different than today. You stop paying for your domain and squatters make sure no one can ever register that domain, for a reasonable fee, ever again.

est31• 4 years ago

as such, a forever registration would have to be a quasi-pyramid scheme where the initial users keep their domains only so long as there are more new users coming in each year than existed in all the past years combined

It doesn't have to be a pyramid scheme. The registrar can also invest the money, and use the interest as revenue. So instead of paying 40 USD annually you pay 1000 USD for the initial registration. 4% interest of that would be 40 USD.

syrrim• 4 years ago

If they took your fee then invested it in some reliable asset, they could theoretically continue to earn an annuity on it indefinitely, which they could use to pay ICANN's fee, any server fees, etc. A hosting company could do the same.

generalizations2• 4 years ago

Put it on ipfs. Long as someone cares, it'll stay up there.

kevincox2• 4 years ago

Not really if you want mutability.

IPNS "records" have a TTL so you need someone with the key actively re-publishing them. I guess in theory you could publish for a very long time but you risk issues of someone maliciously re-sharing an older record that hasn't expired.

I guess once you die you can hope that someone has recorded the last version so you can "move" from IPNS to a regular CID. But IDK how much I would want to rely on that for long-term legacy especially if the TTL on your IPNS record is shirt. Although I guess IPNS records are small enough that it would be fairly easy to set up a service that recorded all published IPNS records. Maybe publish it as a merkle tree so it is infeasible to tamper with old records.

ValentineC2• 4 years ago

I've thought about this too, and it should somewhat be possible to set up some form of long-lived association, with day-to-day management outsourced to professional service providers.

The one-time cost for a domain should be substantial, with the capital put into long-term investments like index funds, which are then used to pay domain renewal (and maybe static webhosting) costs year after year.

If people can set up trust funds for their families and estates, I don't see why it's not possible to do a niche "trust fund" for websites.

Happy to have someone steal my idea. :)

larsiusprime2• 4 years ago

That’s what unstoppable domains supposedly offers, or so I’ve heard.

Vitalik Buterin wrote an interesting analysis about how to allocate scarce domains, contrasting unstoppable’s approach with recurring demand based fees:

https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/should-there-be-de...

CydeWeys5• 4 years ago

Those aren't real domain names though, as they aren't reachable from normal DNS servers. >99.9% of people cannot use these.

CydeWeys5• 4 years ago

We looked into it, but it's essentially impossible under current ICANN rules, which require that domain registrations have an integer number of years of validity of 1 to 10.

tzs3• 4 years ago

I don't think that would work well with the existing TLDs, where domain names often have meaning other than as just a domain name, and there is often more than one person or organization that would want that specific name.

Maybe make a new TLD specifically for infinitely lasting names, say .permanent, and make all top level names under that be 128 bit numbers in some text format randomly generated when you register the domain such as hex or base64. E.g., f560618f355b0ddf560456d41d635e3d.permanent or 9WBhjzVbDd9WBFbUHWNePQ==.permanent.

With those names it doesn't matter that they get locked up forever with the initial registrant.

As a compromise, perhaps you could charge a nominal fee for domain name ownership transfers.

When the name is generated also generate a public/private key pair and associate the public key with the name at the top level servers. Someone is considered to own the domain if they can prove that they have the corresponding private key.

The top level would allow someone who has the private key to ask for a new key pair to be generated to replace the current one.

Want to transfer ownership? Give the new owner the private key and they can use it to do a key change.

This should allow making the top level service entirely automated and cheap to run.

colordrops• 4 years ago

This is one application where blockchain tech could actually solved a real world problem. There are workable DNS systems tied to the Blockchain, which would allow for permanent unassailable domains with no central authority to take it away. Widespread adoption is of course the main issue.

nottorp2• 4 years ago

Pay your fee once, and the domain stays active forever.

We had that for the .ro TLD. What happened was that a lot of useful domain names got acquired by random entities and sat there unused. And i don't mean "you can have this domain for $5K" unused, properly unused.

They switched to a yearly fee model (about 1/5 of what the forever fee was, plus credit if you paid the forever fee in the past 5 years) and that seems to have cleaned up the space a bit.

jameshart• 4 years ago

Forever is, as Prince once pointed out, a mighty long time.

Requiring periodic renewal ensures that the entity that is responsible for the domain is still alive, and still wants it. Allowing an entity to register a domain forever creates the possibility of zombie domains, registered forever through a registrar who has long since gone bust, by a registrant who long ago lost their password... but the registry is obliged to still maintain the last state of that domain's NS records forever.

Nobody would be able to initiate a transfer; nobody would be able to buy the domain off the owner... the resource would be permanently dead.

echelon• 4 years ago

I've thought about putting together a bid for a gTLD, but operating it like every other username-based system. Once you register, you own the domain for free forever.

It's expensive: > $200,000 to apply, ~$50,000 / yr to maintain, plus $0.25 / yr per domain. [1]

You could run such a system on ads, but you could also do the Let's Encrypt / completely open route where you raise money and build up an endowment to run in perpetuity.

Imagine how cool Twitter would be if you had "username.twitter". Or could email "whatever@username.twitter" (or "username@twitter"). Same with gmail, etc.

I've also thought about registering one in my first name and keeping it to myself. It's super nerdy and way cooler than an NFT or ".eth" domain.

[1] https://www.instra.com/en/new-gtlds/pricing

slekker• 4 years ago

Isn’t this the perfect scenario for using a crowdfunded solution? If you consider “forever” to be 100 years for a person, you could charge 1k upfront, and you would need 5000 people to be able to maintain it.

forgotpwd164• 4 years ago

you would need 5000 people to be able to maintain it

For 1yr.

californical• 4 years ago

This is 1000% something I’ve thought about, if I ever got too much money… just registering .name with ICANN and having a website called its.david for example. Email hi@its.david or even like me@david as the full email address if you had a root level mx record[0]. Then of course a root level website of just david.

Would just be insanely fun to play with & ruin other developers days when I complain that their form isn’t accepting my email. And really just generally confusing everyone.

Maybe someday :)

[0] I looked it up, it should be possible!! https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40349412/why-do-not-more...

Biganon• 4 years ago

From the link you've provided:

"For the newer gTLDs, like .google, ICANN's application rules specify that they must not have A or MX records (apart from temporarily the special "if you used this name internally you're about to have a problem" records before the gTLD went live)."

ck2• 4 years ago

you'd also be able to go to just the TLD, ie http:// david /

just like this, the shortest website url that still works?

http://ai/

hericium2• 4 years ago

My take: you may not want a domain unsuitable for email. Most "new" gTLDs and especially cheaper ones[1] have worse deliverability.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32202646

RedShift12• 4 years ago

At work we block a bunch of TLDs like .icu, .xyz, .top, .live, .work, etc... because we only got spam from them.

navigate8310• 4 years ago

Is there a public list of TLDs that organizations block by default? I was surprised to find out .live which I was considering to buy for my family's personal email.

lovingCranberry• 4 years ago

I dislike this kind of overblocking a lot. Not just TLD blocklists, but also IP blocklists.

I recently had to write an email to my local police station (xx@polizei.nrw.de) and their server was rejecting it because my IP (vultr) was on the "Proofpoint® Dynamic Reputation"-blacklist. I owned this single IPv4 for at least 3 years, so they whole vultr range must have been blocked by Proofpoint.

Great if you can't even contact your government because they are using some shitty blocklist product.

Personally, I run a mailcow instance with Rspamd and get only very few spam mails, albeit my email was being leaked in the ledger.com hack a few years ago. When I was still using mailbox.org, I got crypto spam mails (update your wallet yada yada) in my inbox twice a day. So just a configuration thing(?).

pvinis2• 4 years ago

oh.. that seems bad.

first, it seems unfair.

second, I just got a .cx and plan to use it for email, I hope I don't have issues with it.

irusensei• 4 years ago

A friend of mine got a .su (soviet union) domain for the laughs (he is a staunch free market libertarian). So far so good but I’ve noticed my Unifi IDS was throwing alerts for his website due to the bad rep of the su TLD.

edent7• 4 years ago

That's interesting. I was thinking for using it to receive email, rather than send it. I wonder if that's also a problem?

hericium2• 4 years ago

There shouldn't be any issues with receiving messages sent to newgTLD domain but some websites may refuse to register new accounts with such addresses. Rather uncommon but it may happen.

impalallama• 4 years ago

Appreciate the brevity. There’s zero guff or extraneous info. Just answers the question in the title.

jbirer• 4 years ago

Cue domain getting unregistered under BS excuses.

ilanco• 4 years ago

EU.org domains can be registered for free and do not expire. I've registered one more than 10 years ago, set up DNS using he.net and never had any issues.

Ayesh• 4 years ago

.eu.org namespace isn't crowded either. I could register my first name with it, and gleefully kept it for a few years now. I have more trust with them to run it more than those novelty gTLDs that run all sorts of games to take as much money as possible.

capableweb• 4 years ago

Similarly for JS developers out there, https://js.org/ has free subdomains for anything related to JavaScript

traceroute66• 4 years ago

EU.org domains can be registered for free and do not expire.

But "eu.org" is not a TLD.

If I were looking to register a domain for 10 years, the last thing I would do is put myself at the mercy of a middleman peddling subdomains.

pxx• 4 years ago

All registrations are at the mercy of a middleman, especially gTLD registrations.

sshine• 4 years ago

I experienced my DNS service quitting and being unable to change my nameservers in EU.org; my email had changed, so automatic reset didn’t work, and guess how much tech support you get when you pay zero.

EU.org cannot be recommended for longevity.

afandian• 4 years ago

Not sure if it applies, but when the UK left the EU, our access to EU domains was, predictably, cut off. Apart from the politics of it, it was jarring because domain names can be so pivotal to so many aspects of business and life.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/registering-and-renewing-eu-doma...

eCa• 4 years ago

To avoid confusion: ”This site has no relation with the European Union, despite its name.”[1]

do not expire

The current expiration date for all eu.org domains is 2026-08-08[2].

[1] https://nic.eu.org/

[2] https://who.is/whois/eu.org

1kurac• 4 years ago

See also https://www.getfreedomain.name for more free subdomains like that. I guess something like this is good enough for "a website", but you eventually end up getting what you paid for ...

HollowEyes2• 4 years ago

In my original DNS and Bind book. When people used to look after their own nameservers, it mentions the idea of farming out subdomains in a trusted community spirit.

As such ask a friend to point a subdomain your way.

buro9• 4 years ago

I like that.

And if you were to add your domain to the public suffix list (https://publicsuffix.org/) it would effectively be treated like a domain name rather than subdomain name within browsers for JS security, etc.

For example, if you look at the list: https://publicsuffix.org/list/public_suffix_list.dat

You'll notice that myshopify.com is on there... effectively allowing subdomains of that (customer specific, each customer does not trust other customers) is now treated like a domain so that customer1.myshopify.com and customer2.myshopify.com are both isolated from each other by apps and systems that utilise the PSL (all major browsers, etc).

kps• 4 years ago

Why is this a centralized list instead of just a DNS TXT record?

edent7• 4 years ago

But then you're relying on your friend to keep paying (ever increasing) costs per year to keep their domain registered.

raytube• 4 years ago

You might divide that namespace greatly. The one higher up the pyramid still isn't paying 100,000 whatevera a year. In the main the vast majority of users don't give a rat's arse about the domain. But they do have trust issues. Webs of trust can ease this. And relieve you from the scam world of vanity TLDs and overpriced digital number plates.

dizhn• 4 years ago

It would hurt a lot more if the domain names in the post suddenly become a lot more expensive after 10 years. I don't know if there's an upper limit to what they can charge.

ngcc_hk2• 4 years ago

How about .mobi the author used. You have to eat your own food.

The .feedback problem is more I like to have a domain for a static site under github. I do not mind basic hosting service. But it is nicer if I just escape it to the github one.

For decade … I probably would be gone or not active. Done it guys. Hence no concern.

aurelien• 4 years ago

Thanks for eu.org you offer a free viable solution and just teach me by the way the origin of .org ... incredible

eu.org !

paradite• 4 years ago

Though marketed as "see you" now, the origin of .cyou is apparently Chinese, changyou.

"Changyou" means "freedom to explore", and it's a brand under Sohu, which is popular in China in early days of Internet.

"The intention of the Beijing Gamease Age Digital Technology Co., Ltd. (“Cyou”) in filing this application is to proactively protect the ownership of the “Changyou.com” and “Cyou.com” trademark at the Internet Generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) name space and to provide a trusted, hierarchical and intuitive namespace for registrants and users that use Cyou’s broad range of high-quality entertainment and virtual communities services.

https://icannwiki.org/.cyou

Havoc• 4 years ago

Two more tips - go here

https://porkbun.com/products/domains

Scan down the list looking for sale pricing in renewal column. Occasionally there is 2-3 dollar pa stuff there and you can buy 10 years of that

Also if you meet the nationality requirements netcup does easter sales that have perpetual euro per year .de domains. .de isn't entirely clogged yet so you can get a short-ish name for dev purposes

logifail2• 4 years ago

A typical .uk domain will set you back the thick end of a hundred quid if you want it for a decade! Can I find something cheaper?

The wholesale price for .uk domains is £3.90/year[0] so where does the £100 for ten years figure come from?

[0] https://www.nominet.uk/change-to-uk-domain-wholesale-prices/

edent7• 4 years ago

Because most registrars buy wholesale and sell retail.

I looked at a couple of my normal registrars and they were about a tenner per year per .uk domain.

If you can find one for under a fiver (for multi year) please let me know.

logifail2• 4 years ago

If you can find one for under a fiver (for multi year)

"At cost" (allegedly):

https://www.cloudflare.com/products/registrar/

osigurdson2• 4 years ago

On mydomain.com, .feedback domains are nearly $400/year.

edent7• 4 years ago

.feedback operates a two-tier system. The cheap domains have to use their web-hosting platform, which is pretty limited.

If you want to use it as a real domain, you have to pay a premium price.

osigurdson2• 4 years ago

Thanks. That is good to know. By what mechanism does this arrangement come into play?

lbriner• 4 years ago

If you want a .ovh domain, which is perhaps "markety" but is cheap, you can get one for £1.60 and then £3 per year.

OVH are pretty big and decent and unlikely to go away any time soon.

https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-gb/domains/tld/

elashri• 4 years ago

Does it work with US accounts? It seems that no option for registrar to my US account.

kube-system2• 4 years ago

If you’re looking for longevity, “free” should be the last thing you’re looking for. An agreement without an exchange of value is not an enforceable contract, and so any free service can be revoked at any time, even ones that promise they are “free forever”.

muznar• 4 years ago

Enforceable where? How? An agreement with an exchange of value is not always enforceable either. So, although I too hope exchange of value would add more legitimacy to an agreement, it is not always the case.

rsolva• 4 years ago

I have registereda few .ovh domains for next to nothing. Was it one or two euro a year?

Wronnay• 4 years ago

The price for .stream seem to have been adjusted. Now it costs $45.90 for 10 years on Porkbun.

jl6• 4 years ago

What happens if the sponsor or administrator of one of these gTLDs disappears? A lot of them seem marginal and I wouldn’t be too surprised if some were not around in 10 years.

foepys• 4 years ago

This isn't unprecedented, plenty of vanity TLDs were retired:

https://dzdb.caida.org/tlds/graveyard

jagger27• 4 years ago

None of these seem particularly tragic. It looks like they’re all brands that decided they didn’t want to renew their rights to the TLD. No biggie.

BeFlatXIII• 4 years ago

I wish that table were sortable. Why HTML tables haven't been sortable by clicking their headers since 1.0 of the standard is beyond me.

CydeWeys5• 4 years ago

They won't disappear. There is a process by which ICANN will assign another registry operator to continue hosting them: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/ebero-2013-04-02-en

(Note that all registries are continuously escrowing data on all domains on their TLDs on a daily basis for precisely this reason.)

moepstar• 4 years ago

I'm surprised no one has mentioned afraid.org so far - they're free and seem to be operating since 2001, according to their "About us" page...

I've used their service in the past and as far as i recall, it worked flawlessly...

octoberfranklin2• 4 years ago

Wow, the mess with their upstream registrar two months ago sounds like such a nightmare:

https://afraid.org/news/

Confirms my theory: everything ICANN touches turns to poop.

pvinis2• 4 years ago

Same. Been using it for soooo long. It's fun that the UI has been the same the whole time.

speps• 4 years ago

Of course, paying for hosting for a decade is a different matter!

Not well known as it doesn't seem to have a translated page for it but OVH offers a free 10MB hosting with 1 email account for each domain registered with them [1].

[1] https://www.ovhcloud.com/fr/domains/free-web-hosting/

lonk• 4 years ago

"10MB ought to be enough for anybody"

superkuh2• 4 years ago

If you plan to have an internet connection then you already have hosting. Point the domain at your home IP.

themoonisachees• 4 years ago

Exactly what i did. The biggest price to pay (except knowledge, but this is HN) is the fact that my host uses a mains plug near my router. I personally use an old hp pc as a virtualization host but you can get started with a 40$ raspberry pi.

Then again for US folk this is untenable because of data caps that could be blown by dos attacks. Personally free.fr gets me 5Gb down, 1Gb up for 50 euros a month, so maybe some getting your internet infrastructure up to date is in order first.

KronisLV3• 4 years ago

Point the domain at your home IP.

This doesn't really work, if you're behind carrier grade NAT and inbound traffic gets dropped.

For example, I tried having a homelab where 2 of my servers would be publicly accessible, could join Docker Swarm/Kubernetes clusters that would be controlled from other cloud VPSes or vice versa, but couldn't really do that.

I did actually document how I worked around it by having 2 cheap VPSes with static IP addresses that forwarded traffic to my local servers, with the local servers being the ones to establish the connection with WireGuard in my blog post "How to publicly access your homelab behind NAT": https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/how-to-publicly-access-you...

Of course, forwarding all ports (even if most are closed) might be a little bit insane and the article could be written better, but definitely not everyone gets publicly accessible IPs from their ISP without opening their wallet and forking over some cash (getting a VPS and using WireGuard was easier).

Then again, having a homelab and using personal hardware for hosting non-essential stuff is a pretty great approach! You'll most likely be able to get resources much cheaper than renting VPSes from most providers (especially AWS, Azure and GCP) would be in the long term. That said, things like my homepage or blog are hosted "in the cloud" due to this allowing me to break my homelab or have maintenance windows whenever I want without inconveniencing anyone.

transfire• 4 years ago

Just sell TLDs. Why are we not surfing to `.google` and `.apple`?

Most of the current TLDs are a waste. My clients all want .com addresses because that’s what “customers understand”.

hiptobecubic2• 4 years ago

I've had people tell me my website doesn't work for them. It always turns out to be because they've appended ".com" to it.

thiht12• 4 years ago

I worked in the domain name industry for 4 years. Be careful which TLD you rent (you never buy it). If it’s free, it’s a bad deal, just don’t take it. If it’s a ccTLD (2 characters) not of your own country, don’t take it. Eligibility rules routinely change and you could get kicked out overnight. UK residents lost eligibility to .eu with Brexit for instance. Be careful with sexy ccTLDs such as .io or .so, they belong to small countries which sometimes don’t have a proper resilient infrastructure, and you expose yourself to more DNS issues. A lot of new gTLDs (ie. tlds other than .com, .net, .org and .info) suck ass and were created by speculators. Be very careful. I would only buy a gTLD managed by Google (.app, .dev), Donuts.inc, or Radix. Most of the other crap is not reliable enough to me.

If you can, just stick to .com, .net, or the ccTLD of your country.

animesh• 4 years ago

I went with a .net domain and am so happy to see this insight.

thiht12• 4 years ago

.net might be a bit less sexy than .com but both are managed by Verisign, which is probably the most reliable registry nowadays. They both suffer from the same price increases for the wrong reasons, but you get the peace of mind IMO. Good choice!

y5y5y5jjjj• 4 years ago

buy a gTLD managed by Google (.app, .dev)

"Google suspended our domain out of the blue – lyearn[.]com" -> https://twitter.com/shuchit_gandhi/status/156882926948860313...

thiht12• 4 years ago

This story relates to Google Domains, the registrar entity of Google, not the registry entity.

I would personally never trust Google as a registrar because they have a horrible track record regarding customer support. As a gTLD registry though, they’re supervised by the ICANN and just cannot afford to make a shitty job there. Being a registry is also, IMHO, way easier than being a registrar, you obey ICANN rules, but you’re the one setting the rules for the registrars. Google as a registry is fine. You’re free to not trust them either as a registry, but that would be for personal convictions, not objective.

CydeWeys5• 4 years ago

Note that .com is a TLD operated by Verisign, not Google, and anyway what is at issue here is the domain registrar, not the domain registry.

ayushnix• 4 years ago

I was considering registering another domain for my internal services (I already own a .com domain) but I might end up use it as a public domain, not sure yet. The .one TLD came up in the list of cheap TLDs but I'm not sure if I should consider it. I've heard some email providers simply block the new gTLDs.

jstanley• 4 years ago

If it’s a ccTLD (2 characters) not of your own country, don’t take it. Eligibility rules routinely change and you could get kicked out overnight. UK residents lost eligibility to .eu with Brexit for instance.

But British people were in the EU when they bought their domains. More generally, even if you pick a ccTLD of a country that you live in, how are you supposed to predict whether your specific area will split off and become a separate country?

I think ideally in those cases the people running the Internet infrastructure should be compassionate rather than spiteful, and just let you keep your old domain even if they won't let you register new ones. But that's obviously not what happens.

thiht12• 4 years ago

The EU was spiteful in this case, but that was expected. To be fair, they gave British registrants at least 1 year of grace period to migrate their domains to a new TLD, it didn’t happen overnight in this case.

kfarr• 4 years ago

Yes learned this the hard way with 3d.st . The operators of the .st domain were somehow affected by "force majeure" timed coincidentally around new sanctions on Russia. Essentially the country-approved TLD operator no longer responded to support requests for months. We switched to .org instead

gist• 4 years ago

I worked in the domain name industry for 4 years. Be careful which TLD you rent (you never buy it).

Speaking specifically about .com/org/net/info I would not use either the word 'rent' or 'own' strictly but defacto you own the domain if you continue to pay the really nominal fees every year for renewal with the registrar you choose. That is an entire topic in itself because different registrars have different policies subject to (again for those tld's) ICANN rules.

As such you 'own' the rights to the domain name (same as google, amazon, tesla etc) in the sense that you can sell those rights to someone else if you want or transfer them.

You can think of domain ownership similar to physical real estate where there are property taxes you pay. There are a limited set of circumstances where you can lose the property (don't pay property tax, eminent domain etc) but you don't think you are renting (other than if you are renting).

Now for other things you own there is no annual fee you pay.

irrational2• 4 years ago

If it’s free, it’s a bad deal, just don’t take it.

Can you speak more to this? I am using a free domain for my GitHub pages site. This is not an e-commerce site, it’s just some notes and random stuff. Are there any downsides to using a free domain in my case?

dzek69• 4 years ago

Domains like .tk will be pushed down in Google results, you will have issues when you will try to send mails from such domain, etc. If something is free and attractive it's usually abused.

If you don't care about such things and you can easily move to another domain without any issues (people still accessing old domain, maybe finding a scammy website after domain is being taken from you, your mails no longer being delivered to you) then go for it.

unity10014• 4 years ago

I would only buy a gTLD managed by Google

Google? Who has a grotesque history of shutting stuff down on people's faces because a collection of execs decided so?

talideon4• 4 years ago

They have to follow ICANN rules for registry operators, just like everyone else. Google can't simply shut down their registry operations: management would be moved to another registry operator.

thiht12• 4 years ago

I gave a relevant answer here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32799919

Google Registry is not just any user facing product they can shutdown whenever they want. I have no issue renting a .app or a .dev, but I'd never use Google Domains for that.

ryan29• 4 years ago

I found a pretty good .com a few years ago and this is basically the conclusion I came to when I was trying to decide which matching TLDs to register and which ones are safe to use.

I’m from Canada, so I used the ccTLD for all of my non-public stuff. CIRA seems to be well run.

I was really frustrated by the trendy TLDs, especially the ccTLDs. I felt like I had to register those because anyone willing to use (ex:) .io probably has a high enough risk tolerance they’ll use the name without even considering existing trademarks, etc.. The .io and .co domains are the most frustrating because they’re more expensive than the others.

So I would say relying on .com, .net, and your ccTLD is great advice in terms of TLDs to use, but don’t hesitate to register some of the trendier ones for brand protection because it’s the cheapest thing you can do to discourage others from using the same name.

teddyh4• 4 years ago

I worked in the domain name industry for 4 years.

More than 10 years here. I agree with you, except I would go further and simply recommend against any other weird gTLDs at all. Stick with your national ccTLD unless it is managed by utter incompetents, in which case you have fallbacks like .eu for EU nationals, and .com, .net, .org and .info for the rest.

Going back to the original question, .info seems cheapest of the reasonable TLDs (when registering for 10 years).

derefr2• 4 years ago

Stick with your national ccTLD unless it is managed by utter incompetents, in which case you have fallbacks like .eu for EU nationals, and .com, .net, .org and .info for the rest.

Disregarding the price factor for a moment, would you still prioritize "your own country's ccTLD" over .com, when registering web presence for a company with no particular local presence in its home country? I.e. should a Canadian-based company that mostly serves the US still prefer .ca to .com?

For that matter, does your advice apply to .us?

thiht12• 4 years ago

I would go further and simply recommend against any other weird gTLDs at all.

To be honest you're probably right, but considering it can be hard to find a good .com nowadays, I think going for a somewhat well managed newGTLD is a good option.

HOWEVER, doing the work of knowing which registry is reliable can be a bit hard when you're not in the industry yourself.

t-writescode2• 4 years ago

5ish years, here (though out of the industry for a bit). Why do you recommend against the new gTLDs?

HollowEyes2• 4 years ago

I got stuck in a which domain to buy flip-flop recently.

.info feels like the most benign above.

But when I read them out, www and .com just feel like some relic from yester-year. But we have gotten used to them to the point we don't necessarily notice.

TheFreim• 4 years ago

If it’s a ccTLD (2 characters) not of your own country, don’t take it. Eligibility rules routinely change and you could get kicked out overnight.

One of my domains uses the .ch TLD, from Switzerland, I use it for many account registrations via email. Should I be worried that I will lose access and proactively migrate away from this domain?

cpach2• 4 years ago

.ch is owned by a foundation called “SWITCH”.

If you trust them, it’s fine. I would guess they’ll be around for a while.

https://www.switch.ch/about/foundation/

thiht12• 4 years ago

It depends on the criticity of your domain. Although it's unlikely to happen, Switzerland could decide on a whim to restrict access to .ch to Swiss residents or nationals. My guess is it's very unlikely with Switzerland but who knows? You can judge on the likeliness of that for yourself and act on it accordingly.

Realistically I think you're fine sticking with .ch, but consider one of the original gTLDs for future use (com, net, info, org)

dasyatidprime• 4 years ago

Do they still have the “in case of problems, you might be asked to supply a local postal address for communication” sort of thing that got introduced a bit over a decade ago? (I forget the details and am not in a position to recheck right now.)

rmuratov• 4 years ago

I rent .space domain and use it for my email. Can please tell what could go wrong with it?

thiht12• 4 years ago

.space is managed by Radix, one of the entities I would consider reliable enough for a newGTLD.

For weird newGTLD the worst that can happen is the registry goes bankrupt and their TLDs are not saved by the ICANN or bought by another registry. In this case you'd lose the domain. IMO it's unlikely to happen to Radix.

FunnyBadger• 4 years ago

Definitely agree.

The one I co-own is an old-school .com domain. Probably still the best. If costs are your critical issue, maybe you should re-think your plans for having any of it online. We are not talking about a lot of money in any case.

19h• 4 years ago

You can also just use TLDList and sort by price: https://tld-list.com/. Never buying a domain without consulting it first.

smileybarry4• 4 years ago

We’re so far into internet and email being a necessary utility, that I wonder at what point you’ll get some sort of state-given (but not -controlled) FQDN/email mailbox assigned to your legal name. (EDIT: I don’t mean handing off people’s data to a private corp — instead: there would be proper access control, encryption, etc. in place to prevent spying by the state giving it, or the company hosting it) Some countries have smart card IDs with well-defined PKI & personal certificates, you could build a whole E2EE citizen mailbox with that.

So: the same way you have a state-registered mailing address for official mail etc., you would have a state-registered email address, potentially @city-or-state.country-tld.

Of course you could use whatever email you want but rolling it out in the same process of legal ID means changing the default “paper mail” delivery to email, without having to just manually say “yes I want to receive emails instead” to everything.

ValentineC2• 4 years ago

One problem I see with this is that if one's email somehow gets onto a spammer's list, there's likely no way to change their email address, since it's presumably formed from an ID number of some sort.

smileybarry4• 4 years ago

Right, I didn't think of that, that practically seals it I guess.

Razengan• 4 years ago

Fix those problems: Better spam protection, more stringent penalties for spammers.

numpad0• 4 years ago

Yeah, and harassments are going to be huge problem as well. Full names displayed anywhere unless necessary, is generally a bad idea. It's not going to work - IF taken at full face value without further considerations.

That said, I think might make sense as an address system for signing and verification. It'd be nice if I could just sign into a local municipality or state-level server with a national ID to read notices and do verification, instead of walking to the city hall and twice in a week and uploading drivers_license.jpg to weird e-commerce websites on random occasions.

e2le• 4 years ago

Ideally it would only be possible to receive mail from the government and a select few entities (bank, electricity provider, etc).

presumably formed from an ID number of some sort.

One possible solution is that the address for an individual must be obtained from a directory before sending a mail. Allowing for the possibility of changing it in the future. Access to that information can then be granted/revoked by the individual as they see fit. Something similar to re:claimID.

https://www.gnunet.org/en/reclaim/tech.html

ssivark2• 4 years ago

Changing an email address seems like a solution totally out of proportion to the pesky problem of spam. I can see many ways for the system to work effectively:

1. Have this "official" email only for communication with "state" entities, or some such filtered allow-list. It would be fantastic to have a high-SNR electronic channel for "all the important govt bureaucratic stuff". Folks could always forward mail to a unified inbox if they wish, but regardless they get an effective filtering tool.

2. For non allow-list entities, charge some trivial amount for every incoming mail that goes unread or gets flagged by a user as spam (or some such). I suspect this will quickly change the economics to make most spray-and-pray crap to become unviable.

In essence, as with any communication system, I think the most important design goal is to have high SNR (Signal-to-Noise Ratio) channels which we can suitably label for specific delineated intents. We shouldn't be treating the inbox as a monolith with all pieces of uniform importance (or dictated by the shiny content of emails); we should be able to leverage IT to have the system work in the user's interest -- it's a matter of setting up incentives/responsibilities.

avivo• 4 years ago

Halfbaked thought: Have it cost half the amount as normal mail to receive email there. Perhaps also gov use is free, and users can whitelist specific domains or subdomains to be free.

edent7• 4 years ago

Most people around the world don't have a state registered postal address.

But, if they did, would that imply that the state ought to provide a free home to anyone who needs it?

Similarly, there's no state requirement to have a smartphone - or even a phone number. I understand that citizens of the USA can qualify for a state-provided phone and number, but I think that's quite rare.

Given that there are a plethora of free email providers, why would the state step in to manipulate this market?

smileybarry4• 4 years ago

Most people around the world don't have a state registered postal address.
Similarly, there's no state requirement to have a smartphone - or even a phone number. I understand that citizens of the USA can qualify for a state-provided phone and number, but I think that's quite rare.

True, also -- this is mostly based on my experience in Israel, not the USA, if that was accidentally implied. Here you do have some form of state-registered postal address (and can't remove, only change it), I don't know what homeless people have registered but from a brief check it's ignored if they're homeless. Instead, the city they're staying in handles it.

There's no smartphone requirement, but I'm not sure how they deal with someone who just doesn't have any phone, it's a requirement in a lot of auxiliary services.

Given that there are a plethora of free email providers, why would the state step in to manipulate this market?

I thought that provisioning it with the relatively-new smart card IDs (i.e. certificate authentication) would allow for better starting security, less hacked accounts and such.

Arubis• 4 years ago

would that imply that the state ought to provide a free home to anyone who needs it?

In some few countries & metro areas, people have decided to answer Yes to this question, so it’s not purely rhetorical.

UncleEntity2• 4 years ago

I understand that citizens of the USA can qualify for a state-provided phone and number, but I think that's quite rare.

The so called “Obama phones”, not so rare…

They also have low-income landline programs, I believe, along with low-income home internet plans but I think the internet ones are for households with school age children judging by the radio ads I used to hear.

Symbiote2• 4 years ago

In Denmark I have a state-registered address (official letters come here), a state-registered digital mailbox (in practise, official letters go there), and a state-registered bank account (a tax refund or other money from the state would go there).

At least the state-registered address is required in many countries.

(Homeless people are still registered. The address might be a homelessness charity, or a whole city district.)

unity10014• 4 years ago

But, if they did, would that imply that the state ought to provide a free home to anyone who needs it?

Yes.

ssivark2• 4 years ago

I'm increasingly keen on such a system. If nothing else, it removes the massive costs & uncertainty of paper delivery, and allows a searchable archive of the "important" bureaucratic stuff. Among other things, this also means that you don't have to update addresses in a hundred registries every time you move. This will obviously be a target for spammers, so I don't mind controlling inbox access very strictly (suggested a couple of mechanisms down the thread).

Basically, a high SNR channel which can be delineated for specific intent. This can be controlled through allow-lists or whatever.

Even from the state's perspective, this seems like a very cheap solution to what must be a great administrative burden.

maratc• 4 years ago

This seems like trying to find a problem for the email solution.

The mail system as it is is working. It has been for many years. It costs a non-significant amount of money to send mail, so this takes care of the spam problem: spam exists but isn't free so it isn't profitable. There's no need to have PKI or "personal certificates" infrastructure so even 80-year olds can receive and read mail.

I have a mailbox. The government is obligated to send stuff there. If I move, I can redirect my mail. I would hate to have a (new) obligation to check my "government-assigned" email box (protected by "PKI" or "personal certificate"), or face penalties for not doing that — in addition to my obligation to check my mailbox. My parents would never be able to take care of it, so it would fall (again) on me to check their email boxes as well.

Lurkars• 4 years ago

I am still surprised about the results. I am hosting on a German provider netcup.de once a year they have special offers for de-domains, on average 1,66€/year. My cheapest is for 1,44€/year (plus 2€ setup once), and price is fixed. So it's not a 10 year comittement, but auto-renewal every year, so last ten years I paid overall 16,40€ (so ~16.60 USD) for a de-TLD without any limitations.

eqtn• 4 years ago

.in can be registered for 10 years for $40 on dynadot

edent7• 4 years ago

That's useful, thanks!

btdmaster• 4 years ago

FreeDNS has the following subdomains: https://freedns.afraid.org/domain/registry/

I do not remember how often you need to renew, but I do know that their service is not maliciously commercial like Freenom.

amelius• 4 years ago

I'd be more worried by the registrar stealing your domain once it becomes successful. Does that happen in practice?

xaduha• 4 years ago

https://www.domcomp.com

thepra2• 4 years ago

Blazor WebAssembly might be your pick, there's a starting template, write the front-end in c# and everything else in HTML and CSS as usual.

It's such a breeze developing even complex webapps with it like my project collanon.app

sunbum• 4 years ago

What does this have to do with cheap domain names?

thepra2• 4 years ago

damn, commented on the wrong thread. I'm sorry

zxcvbn4038• 4 years ago

I’ve worked at a couple large internet entities and both of them spend stupid amounts of money buying their domains and typeos of their domains in every tld. They also pay for the porn versions of their names just so porn producers don’t register them. On top of that they pay other entities to have a legal presence where needed to secure country tlds. They also pay for full time monitoring to ensure they don’t lose their domsins to time or changing requirements. It is hundreds of thousands a year in the end.

I’m clearly in the wrong business.

bhartzer• 4 years ago

Not sure about the cheapest one, but I know the most expensive one is any domain that you register at an unsecure registrar.

If the domain is stolen, it will end up potentially costing you thousands to get it back. And that’s if you don’t use it for a website.

efitz• 4 years ago

10 year maintenance schedules are practically guaranteed to cause an outage.

If you have to perform a maintenance task once every 10 years, you will not remember to do it (reminder mechanisms are not really designed and tested for such long intervals).

It’s also extremely unlikely that all the business entities involved will still be in their current form. It’s possible that the new business will have lost the information reach out to you to remind you. You might have moved, changed email or phone numbers.

You might have died, your family depends on the domain, and they lose their email one day because the MX record expired.

The whole industry can change in just a few years; 10 year renewal seems like a bad idea to me.

cubesnooper• 4 years ago

I wouldn’t recommend renewing your domain every ten years, but I do always purchase my domains for ten years and subsequently renew every single year. That gives me a modicum of safety from certain life circumstances (e.g., there’s an HN commenter who lost access to his email due to a stint in prison).

adolph4• 4 years ago

DNS is a scam and has been from the start. It’s just SEO with the gravitas of ICAN and the combined biz ethos of payday lending and rental furniture. Just market your IPv6 and self-sign your certs. Provide a hosts file for people who really want to type something in to Mosaic but don’t know how.

anaganisk• 4 years ago

So you typed in the IPV6 of news.ycombinator.com or do u have your hosts file set to it?

adolph4• 4 years ago

I also never close tabs. Brave opens all windows and tabs after a reboot.

What's the cheapest domain you can register for 10 years?

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