Porkbun is pretty solid

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 :)

Wait here are you getting a $10/year VPS?

I use cloudflare for both my domains. $17 or so each.

Honestly you can spend as little as a couple bucks if you dont care about a name. I like cloudflare but almost any registrar is fine as long as you pay for the domain.