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.<p>If you can, just stick to .com, .net, or the ccTLD of your country.
Though marketed as "see you" now, the origin of .cyou is apparently Chinese, <i>changyou</i>.<p>"Changyou" means "freedom to explore", and it's a brand under Sohu, which is popular in China in early days of Internet.<p><i>"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.</i><p><a href="https://icannwiki.org/.cyou" rel="nofollow">https://icannwiki.org/.cyou</a>
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 <i>-controlled</i>) 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.<p>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.<p>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.
I'd really like to see 'forever' domain registration.<p>Pay your fee once, and the domain stays active forever.<p>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.<p>As a compromise, perhaps you could charge a nominal fee for domain name ownership transfers.
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.
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.<p>It's expensive: > $200,000 to apply, ~$50,000 / yr to maintain, plus $0.25 / yr per domain. [1]<p>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.<p>Imagine how cool Twitter would be if you had "username.twitter". Or could email "whatever@username.twitter" (or "username@twitter"). Same with gmail, etc.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.instra.com/en/new-gtlds/pricing" rel="nofollow">https://www.instra.com/en/new-gtlds/pricing</a>
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”.
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.
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.<p>As such ask a friend to point a subdomain your way.
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.<p>OVH are pretty big and decent and unlikely to go away any time soon.<p><a href="https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-gb/domains/tld/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-gb/domains/tld/</a>
Two more tips - go here<p><a href="https://porkbun.com/products/domains" rel="nofollow">https://porkbun.com/products/domains</a><p>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<p>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
> Of course, paying for hosting for a decade is a different matter!<p>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].<p>[1] <a href="https://www.ovhcloud.com/fr/domains/free-web-hosting/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ovhcloud.com/fr/domains/free-web-hosting/</a>
You can also just use TLDList and sort by price: <a href="https://tld-list.com/" rel="nofollow">https://tld-list.com/</a>. Never buying a domain without consulting it first.
My take: you may not want a domain unsuitable for email. Most "new" gTLDs and especially cheaper ones[1] have worse deliverability.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32202646" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32202646</a>
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.<p>I’m clearly in the wrong business.
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...<p>I've used their service in the past and as far as i recall, it worked flawlessly...
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.
10 year maintenance schedules are practically guaranteed to cause an outage.<p>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).<p>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.<p>You might have died, your family depends on the domain, and they lose their email one day because the MX record expired.<p>The whole industry can change in just a few years; 10 year renewal seems like a bad idea to me.
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.
Just sell TLDs. Why are we not surfing to `.google` and `.apple`?<p>Most of the current TLDs are a waste. My clients all want .com addresses because that’s what “customers understand”.
> 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?<p>The wholesale price for .uk domains is £3.90/year[0] so where does the £100 for ten years figure come from?<p>[0] <a href="https://www.nominet.uk/change-to-uk-domain-wholesale-prices/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nominet.uk/change-to-uk-domain-wholesale-prices/</a>
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.
FreeDNS has the following subdomains: <a href="https://freedns.afraid.org/domain/registry/" rel="nofollow">https://freedns.afraid.org/domain/registry/</a><p>I do not remember how often you need to renew, but I do know that their service is not maliciously commercial like Freenom.
Not sure about the cheapest one, but I know the most expensive one is any domain that you register at an unsecure registrar.<p>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.
How about .mobi the author used. You have to eat your own food.<p>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.<p>For decade … I probably would be gone or not active. Done it guys. Hence no concern.
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.<p>It's such a breeze developing even complex webapps with it like my project collanon.app