I’m using DuckDNS currently, but am hoping to up my game with Caddy etc and want my own domain with more than the 5 subdomains. Any recommendations for providers?
I’ve had good experiences with Namecheap for domains. Some of their support people are also in Ukraine, so if you’re of a mind to support them, giving them your business will do that at least a little.
One word of advice–it can be smart to have the domain name with one provider, and the hosting with a different one. That way if your hosting situation goes bad for whatever reason, you still have control of your domain and can point it at a new host as quickly as you can buy space and they can provision it (with time for DNS to propagate of course).
Basically, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. When I did webhost support, I saw WAY too many small business owners get into pickles because they had hosting AND domain with the same provider, and when something went wrong with that provider, it was just such a huge PITA to get control of the domain.
No recs for hosting, I don’t currently have a webpage up (just email) and my knowledge is way out of date, from like 2008 when I worked for a webhost as support.
One word of advice–it can be smart to have the domain name with one provider, and the hosting with a different one.
If OP is thinking of DDNS, he might be looking at hosting from home. If you’re using a VPS, the IP generally doesn’t change so DDNS isn’t really required.
I agree with your Namecheap recommendation though. I use it to access my docker containers that’s running on a NAS box at home. My router runs the DDNS client and periodically notifies Namecheap whenever my home IP changes.
I prefer porkbun for my domain provider. They’re kind of the darling of the self-hosting community, it seems. But I picked them because they were pretty inexpensive.
Buy the domain itself wherever you want. I like cloudflare, and a lot of people also suggest porkbun.com. You then point the nameservers for your domain to whatever DNS service you want. If you stick to cloudflare then it’s already done for you.
For dynamic DNS I use cloudflare’s one using my router to keep it updated. It’s easy to set up. Depending on your router you may need to run a service on a machine to do this instead. things like pfsense/opnsense should have it built-in.
Another +1 for Cloudflare. They’re selling the domain at their wholesale rate, which is generally cheaper than everywhere else. There’s also many DDNS clients as well as an API to allow you to roll your own (which is what I did).
+1 for CloudFlare, also gives you the ability to setup basic restrictions based on source IP/ASN/etc.
Cloudflare for both honestly.
I just set up a wildcard subdomain record and with a few lines in docker-compose Traefik sets up a new subdomain in seconds, certs and all.
They charge the minimum renew amount for domains, plus you can use several different tools like cf-ddns, cfddns, or cloudflare-ddns
There is also a DDNS service that i believe comes with or at least is available for pfsense to auto update to cloudflare, works great.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System IP Internet Protocol NAS Network-Attached Storage VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 20 acronyms.
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I was with Google Domains but switched to Namecheap. They are easy enough to work with and not the most expensive.
Cloudflare if you want one of the handful of TLDs they support, namecheap otherwise. For namecheap I still point the nameservers at Cloudflare so they can manage the site. For DDNS I use DDclient, it works, that’s about all I can or should say about a DDNS client.
Just go Cloudflare. The dot.win told they have is incredible value ~3$ per annum if i remember correctly.
Other pros of using Cloudflare:
- Cloudflare ddns
- Cloudflare tunnels
- Cloudflare proxy
It does a a few cons, like not being able to use custom nameservers if you aren’t paying 200$ a month. Also the fact of Cloudflare being an internet gatekeeper may not be to your liking.
Dynadot offers free .link domains.
Edit: posted to wrong tab, doh
I used Google Domains for many years.
I think mostly because it came as a package with my Google Workspace account.
But the whole "selling their domain accounts to Squarespace and not even bothering to notify us kind of turned me off to them.
I am now happily using Cloudflare instead.
Frankly I don’t miss it.
The rates seem a tiny bit cheaper and the API/etc is far more advanced.I suspect I will be much happier with Cloudflare in the long run