Domu
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West Yorks, UK

As the title says, anyone got reccomendations for buying a domain name for a few years? Worried about the lack of transparency of lots of providers; offering cheap domain for a year but with no indication of how much they hike up the price by thereafter.

I'm planning on using a cargocollective site with a personalised URL to begin with so i'm looking at getting domain and hosting seperately; Im also kind of worried about getting the domain through a website building service such as wix.com (and then also using their building tools) will cause problems with domain ownership if I decide to build my own site or hire someone to do so at a later date.

Any help much appreciated; Im a graphic designer by trade and an avid hobbyist programmer, but have very little in the way of knowledge about such web matters.

Cheers!

catskull
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NUMBSKULL

I use google domains. $12 a year. Free private registration.

I would stay away from wix. If you think you can build a site there and then download the html once you're ready to move on, think again.

The One Electronic
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Detroit

plz tell me you're getting http://do.mu

Cooshinator
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ohio gozaimasu

I use dynadot for my domain and it works fine. I don't think it matters that much, but some are cheaper than others.

I and several other people I know host on DigitalOcean which is really dope from my experience

nitro2k01
Offline
Sweeeeeeden

The truth about .com domains is that you won't get them for under $10/year long term. Every claim of $0.99 domains is one time coupons, typically when buying other services. With that in mind, pay the $11-$12 and look for a quality provider instead of hunting for the cheapest. Dynadot and Google Domains as mentioned above are both respectable choices.

As for hosting, I too use Digital Ocean. But keep in mind that what they offer is a VPS service, so you have to set up and manage the server yourself. This is fine for me, but might not be for everyone.

catskull
Offline
NUMBSKULL

nitro, can you offer some insight into digital ocean? What do you host there, what plan are you one, etc?

nitro2k01
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Sweeeeeeden

I'm hosting various websites, including my blog and my Gameboy development site on a LAMP stack. It's atm very low usage. I'm nowhere near 100% usage of bandwidth or CPU. I'm on the $10/month package. (30 GB storage, 1 GB RAM). I chose this over the lowest tier because I ideally needed more than 20 GB disk space and 512 MB RAM seemed a bit low. (I didn't want RAM swapping to become a bottleneck under increased load.) I'm using an Ubuntu server. They do also offer one-click apps as they call it, which may be useful but I haven't tried that. So far I have no complaints about the service.

I migrated away from a managed web host about 6 months ago. I first tried Linode. On paper, they have a slightly better service than DO in terms of manageability. However, a friend recommended me to choose Linode instead due to the rumors that someone had gained access to a VM and was able to steal a large amount of bitcoin, either by a vulnerability in the system or with the help of an employee. In either case, that was enough for me to avoid Linode altogether on principle, even if the risk of me in particular getting affected was low. It's also for the same reason I would never touch Godaddy, as they have a reputation of having frequent vulnerabilities in their hosting environment.

Vellain
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Tacoma, WA

I use DO for a lot of things as well, but lately have been playing around a lot with Amazon EC2 instances. The good thing about the EC2 instances is that, similar to the easy set-up boxes that DO does, Amazon has a bunch of apps and guides for quick deployment of systems for various purposes. I am looking at integrating some mobile platform stuff into some of my existing projects and the Amazon Web Services keep it all pretty well containerized.

nonfinite
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Madison, WI

If you want to spend $0 a month on your hosting you can set up a free static page at github

tearauth
Offline
UK
catskull wrote:

nitro, can you offer some insight into digital ocean? What do you host there, what plan are you one, etc?

I use digital ocean to host a freebsd server for a wordpress site, its visited enough and has an ecommerce plugin running (ecommerce) and it only costs me roughly $6 a month (low traffic). First 2 months I got free with a promo code that gave me ten dollars of credit

I am in UK but am happy enough with this to carry on using it, and the server is actually in UK too as you choose destination

Domu
Offline
West Yorks, UK
The One Electronic wrote:

plz tell me you're getting http://do.mu

I am now as an aside, great idea!

Many thanks for the suggestions guys!

Last edited by Domu (Jun 30, 2016 9:42 am)