Domains are pretty cheap but respect on getting it done for free
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abff08f4813c@j4vcdedmiokf56h3ho4t62mlku.srv.us 4 months agoGood question!
I essentially self-host my own pyfedi instance ( pyfedi is to piefed.social as lemmy is to aussie.zone ) - and thanks to srv.us I do it for free! (Well, I have my own internet connection that's subsidized and run the software on an old spare laptop at home, so still free overall, but srv.us just provides the permanent domain name.)
Alas, the price of not paying for a persistent and unchanging domain name is not being able to choose the domain name.
bdonvr@thelemmy.club 4 months ago
Baku@aussie.zone 4 months ago
I paid $1.80 for my first domain (which was a .lol TLD, a little obscure but worked for me). It’s now renewing at $26, though. The more well known ones are a fair bit more expensive though, and rarely have introductory sales. There are a lot of random weird domains nobody’s ever heard of that only renew for a few bucks a year on going though.
It wouldn’t work for a Lemmy instance, unless you don’t mind changing instances every year, but you could theoretically get domains for less than a dollar for at least a few decades by constantly changing domains every time you’re due for a renewal, to make the most of the introductory discounts lots of them have
bdonvr@thelemmy.club 4 months ago
Nah just find a registrar that doesn’t charge beyond ICANN fees. Should be ~$12 per year or so for .com. Won’t get any crazy introductory rates but you won’t get rate hiked down the road either. Cloudflare does this. Porkbun too and actually it looks like they are doing a promo of $7 for the first year right now.
Looking at it .lol just goes for $23 in general, which iirc is set by the central registry of each tld
Baku@aussie.zone 4 months ago
Interesting. I very briefly ran a test Lemmy instance off a raspberry pi I had laying around, but shut it down because I was worried about having an open port on my network and exposing my IP to the world. Then I tried to run an actual Lemmy instance on a proper VPS and ironically had more issues with that than running it at home!