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Can you recommend me a free domain service? (piefed.social)
submitted 6 days ago* by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I want to try out some things with a secondary domain. I’d prefer ethical and non-shady providers. I have a fixed IP and a VPS to go with it, so it’s really only about the domain. A subdomain of my current domain is not enough. A subdomain of the provider would be OK but not ideal.
Even paying very little is not an option right now - maybe later.

Doing some preliminary research, the keyword seems to be Dynamic DNS even if I have a static IP. There are providers but those that pop up easily do not instil much confidence.

I want to hear the Fediverse's opinions! I haven't found any recent posts about this.

TIA

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[–] 9 points 6 days ago (7 children)

nobody said desec.io yet, it's a non profit from berlin and they give free subdomains under dedyn.io, with a proper API, so you can do the DNS challenge for let's encrypt (there's a caddy plugin for it too). I haven't run a domain there myself so can't say how it is long term, but for a "try some things" domain it looks like the least shady of the free ones I guess.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 days ago* (4 children)

    *.dedyn.io registrations are discontinued indefinitely right now unfortunately, following a wave of abusive registrations.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago (3 children)

    oh, didn't know that, thanks for the heads up. deSEC still hosts dns for free if you bring your own domain I think, so a cheap one plus deSEC for the acme dns challenge still works, just not the free subdomain part

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  • [–] 1 point 3 days ago (2 children)

    Yeah, they still host for free. I think they've limited the amount of domains you can host per account though, again due to abuse because there were actors that were bringing in thousands of domains I believe. But if you just want to host one domain it's fine.

    The API makes the difference (vs DNS services at the registrar), DeSEC is well supported by most tools so you can do DDNS and DNS-01 with it without problems.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago (1 child)

    good to know about the limit, thanks. for one domain plus DNS-01 that's all most of us need anyway

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  • [–] 1 point 15 hours ago

    Yeah I can understand small self-hosters having maybe a handful of domains but some users were coming in with thousands. I mean if you have thousands of domains there's obviously something else going on and maybe you should be paying someone for that.

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