What's the cheapest domain you can register for 10 years?
shkspr.mobi
shkspr.mobi
If you can, just stick to .com, .net, or the ccTLD of your country.
"Google suspended our domain out of the blue – lyearn[.]com" -> https://twitter.com/shuchit_gandhi/status/156882926948860313...
I would personally never trust Google as a registrar because they have a horrible track record regarding customer support. As a gTLD registry though, they’re supervised by the ICANN and just cannot afford to make a shitty job there. Being a registry is also, IMHO, way easier than being a registrar, you obey ICANN rules, but you’re the one setting the rules for the registrars. Google as a registry is fine. You’re free to not trust them either as a registry, but that would be for personal convictions, not objective.
When I trust a company to be my gTLD registry, what am I trusting them with? Why is Google safer than e.g. the government of Tuvalu, or some private "speculator", if they all have to follow ICANN rules?
Don't see much of a difference there.
Google is safer because it only manages gTLDs. They can set part of the rules, but not all the rules. They have to follow ICANN’s rules. In particular, the dispute process goes through the ICANN which gives a somewhat neutral safety net. It’s far from perfectly, probably not even good enough, but still gives you more warranties than using a random ccTLD.
Speculators bought newGTLDs in the hope of selling tons of them but often dramatically failed. Registering a gTLD to the ICANN costs at least $400,000 if I remember well, so a lot of crappy newGTLDs are not profitable. When the registry goes bankrupt, I don’t know what happens to the customers. My guess is the ICANN tried to re-sell the TLD management on auction, and if they fail, then people would lose their domain. Very few newGTLDs succeeded, I’d stick with these and not try anything fun but too exotic.
But British people were in the EU when they bought their domains. More generally, even if you pick a ccTLD of a country that you live in, how are you supposed to predict whether your specific area will split off and become a separate country?
I think ideally in those cases the people running the Internet infrastructure should be compassionate rather than spiteful, and just let you keep your old domain even if they won't let you register new ones. But that's obviously not what happens.
I don't know how useful that is in practise, but it's not the only CCTLD with this restriction.
That logic defies description. If you are not a member of a certain country or economic zone, you cannot get and keep that zone's exclusive domains. Thats law. What you are saying is that the Eu should have made an exception for the Brits and allowed them to keep doing what others are not allowed. That sounds like too much exceptionalist entitlement.
In 2010, nearly 10% of the revenue of the Government of Tuvalu came from royalties from .tv addresses.
> You may register a .eu, .ею or .ευ domain name if you fulfil the following criteria:
> You represent an organisation established in one of the European Union Member States; or Iceland, Liechtenstein or Norway. You are an individual residing in one of the European Union Member States, Iceland, Liechtenstein, or Norway, or a citizen of one of the European Union Member States, Iceland, Liechtenstein, or Norway (as of 2 August 2021).
There's nothing which requires the EU to impose that law, but it is law nevertheless.
It would be different if the parent had written "If you are not a member of the EU. . ." but that was not what was written.
Likewise, an EU law that governs only EU assets isn't transnational. For example, Poland doesn't have eligibility criteria [0] but French ccTLDs like .pm do [1]. As I read the restriction text I detect a touch of the spite referred to elsewhere as it has exceptions for other non-EU-member European countries: "Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein"
A year's grace was pretty generous, and has the domains been transferred to an EEA-based entity (such as a subsidiary based in the EEA or an EEA-based proxy, which is a service some .EU registrars provide), then they could keep them.
If it's not actively "spiteful" to impair stability, when the only cost is an ever-so-modest impact to brand purity, then at the very least it's a short-sighted way to cause a deadweight economic loss to humanity.
I guess that's just what rule-by-bureaucracy does, though, including EU bureaucracy: every day, they make decisions that affect people, always bringing the greatest possible reverence for the rules, and paying as little regard as possible to the price of the consequences of their decisions, which are fundamentally someone else's problem.
The UK government fucked everyone over with Brexit, largely because they didn't care to think about the consequences.
Yes! A visa! Thank you! The strident heart and soul of the inhuman, inhumane, soulless bureaucracy. It is exactly like that.
This isn't exactly something to be lauded or celebrated! Have you ever dealt with having a visa? Have you ever been impacted by the uncertainty and confusion of the nation you are living in, changing its rules about your visa? Do you have any concept at all of the economic and the humanitarian impact of the bureaucracy's machinations around and involving visas? Even aside from the worst of that, have you ever abandoned a job and friends and the life you were trying to build somewhere, because someone changed the rules about visas? I liked that job, sir.
Oh, let me tell you about visas! I will tell you about them all day long. But, ah — I think it was a more flattering to the decision-makers when we were just talking about the cost of broken URLs and email addresses.
And then yes, like visa recognition agreements, if your country withdraws from a visa accord or economic region, the host country has no obligation to keep you credentialed, or domained. If unhappy about such thing, a more effective path is to activate compatriots against the withdrawal, rather than fuss at the host zone.
My friend, if these systems were just about aligning the incentives for workers and benefits and taxes, and otherwise tried to be understanding about human foibles, then people wouldn't point to immigration systems around the world as a Kafkaesque nightmare.
Just to pick an example — chosen for my familiarity, wholly outside of and unrelated to Brexit — the UK's Windrush scandal involved the bureaucracy actively destroying old records of immigration from British overseas possessions (particularly the Caribbean), then deciding years later to go after people who had been living in the country for decades — demanding they supply exhaustive documentation of their legal immigration, and their life and activities in the intervening time. Rest assured that this was a fully adversarial process! They did not offer to help anyone so affected gather these documents, or to make their case.
And later, in another unrelated scandal, the Home Office decided to react to an English-examination cheating scandal by analyzing everyone's examination results with some opaque computerized process, using the results to declare something like 97% of them as invalid cheaters — and sending nastygrams to about 9,700 university students, calling them dirty cheaters and demanding they leave country. Many of them did, and they forcibly removed others. Notably, they did not ask for them to re-sit the exam. They did not care about the lives ruined.
Of course the matter of the .eu domain is absolutely nothing compared to the daily nightmare that is "visas," but the same devotion to rules and insensitivity to the costs of policy runs through the matter. They could have grandfathered in existing domains, at least a little bit longer. I know that if I had a website and I had to move domains, I would want to run web and email forwarding for more than one year. If they wanted to be particular about just having the forwarding, they could have audited the sites to make sure that they were just redirects, and charged for the privilege. They didn't. There's no sane reason that couldn't happen except to preserve The Rules — but these rules simply are not a valuable end in and of themselves, despite the laud and honor they have received in this thread.
Funny how applying the eligibility the rules to you as they do to everyone else in the world who is not a member of the EU is seen as spiteful by you.
So I wish you all the best of luck as your continent, now deprived of the economic impulse of cheap Russian gas, discovers the true weight of its overbearing and inflexible regulatory state, and deindustrializes with a scale and speed never seen before in human history (already ArcelorMittal is importing iron from the US rust belt, of all places!!!). And I'm actually, legitimately, genuinely sorry for everything the populist backlash is going to do as things fall apart, because I expect it to be very ugly.
Visas are an imperfect tool for whatever they are designed to do, and any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy will develop ways to misuse such a gift.
They are a complete mess, especially so from the EU countries. US and UK have been more reasonable (no hard requirements of what documentation is needed, as long as you can prove that you are travelling with an actual purpose, and once granted, it's for at least 6 months for UK or 3 years in case of the US), but luckily we've entered the Schengen whitelist since.
Ah yes. Because the UK isn't planning on sending refugees in Rwanda. /s
Amazing how you would think that your particular field of work would be excepted.
a couple of opinionated words there that you didn't support.
drastic for sure is false as it took quite awhile to go through, much longer than the merger in fact.
For my opinionated sentence I will say... Britain is better off, the EU is an abomination.
The definition of 'drastic' does not necessarily mean quick (although it can). Definitions of drastic include (collected variously from Oxford, Cambridge, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries): 'having very noticeable effects', 'likely to have a strong or far-reaching effect', and 'extreme in effect [...]'.
I think Brexit fits this definition.
With regards to your opinionated sentence, you are entitled to your opinion that the EU is an 'abomination', although it is just an opinion without any support, and it's provably incorrect that Britain 'IS' better off (although an argument can be made that the potential long term benefits of Brexit may outweigh the current short term negative impact, it's far from being certain, and definitely should not be discussed in the present tense).
I guess the point is that one should only go with commercial domain names, and never with political ones (which all country code TLDs are by definition).
The nature of democracy is that you don't always get your way.
Barnier kept the door open for all kinds of intermediate levels of association, but the British delegation kept saying no and pushing for hard Brexit. Well, that's what they got.
You're expecting the UK to be treated specially.
The UK helped to implement the following regulations on who can register for a .eu TLD at that time:
(i) undertaking having its registered office, central administration or principal place of business within the Community, or
(ii) organisation established within the Community without prejudice to the application of national law, or
(iii) natural person resident within the Community;
(Regulation (EC) No 733/2002 of the European Parliament and of the Council, Article 4 (2) (b))
There were some amendments in 2019, but the meaning is broadly the same as the original draft (at least in this context). The key relevant change is the addition an entitlement for EU citizens who are not resident in the EU (e.g.: those who live in the UK).
Speaking specifically about .com/org/net/info I would not use either the word 'rent' or 'own' strictly but defacto you own the domain if you continue to pay the really nominal fees every year for renewal with the registrar you choose. That is an entire topic in itself because different registrars have different policies subject to (again for those tld's) ICANN rules.
As such you 'own' the rights to the domain name (same as google, amazon, tesla etc) in the sense that you can sell those rights to someone else if you want or transfer them.
You can think of domain ownership similar to physical real estate where there are property taxes you pay. There are a limited set of circumstances where you can lose the property (don't pay property tax, eminent domain etc) but you don't think you are renting (other than if you are renting).
Now for other things you own there is no annual fee you pay.
Can you speak more to this? I am using a free domain for my GitHub pages site. This is not an e-commerce site, it’s just some notes and random stuff. Are there any downsides to using a free domain in my case?
If you don't care about such things and you can easily move to another domain without any issues (people still accessing old domain, maybe finding a scammy website after domain is being taken from you, your mails no longer being delivered to you) then go for it.
Google? Who has a grotesque history of shutting stuff down on people's faces because a collection of execs decided so?
Google Registry is not just any user facing product they can shutdown whenever they want. I have no issue renting a .app or a .dev, but I'd never use Google Domains for that.
I’m from Canada, so I used the ccTLD for all of my non-public stuff. CIRA seems to be well run.
I was really frustrated by the trendy TLDs, especially the ccTLDs. I felt like I had to register those because anyone willing to use (ex:) .io probably has a high enough risk tolerance they’ll use the name without even considering existing trademarks, etc.. The .io and .co domains are the most frustrating because they’re more expensive than the others.
So I would say relying on .com, .net, and your ccTLD is great advice in terms of TLDs to use, but don’t hesitate to register some of the trendier ones for brand protection because it’s the cheapest thing you can do to discourage others from using the same name.
More than 10 years here. I agree with you, except I would go further and simply recommend against any other weird gTLDs at all. Stick with your national ccTLD unless it is managed by utter incompetents, in which case you have fallbacks like .eu for EU nationals, and .com, .net, .org and .info for the rest.
Going back to the original question, .info seems cheapest of the reasonable TLDs (when registering for 10 years).
Disregarding the price factor for a moment, would you still prioritize "your own country's ccTLD" over .com, when registering web presence for a company with no particular local presence in its home country? I.e. should a Canadian-based company that mostly serves the US still prefer .ca to .com?
For that matter, does your advice apply to .us?
In this case it doesn't matter in terms of reliability. If you target the US, maybe go with .com, unless .ca brings something (if it's a pun, or if you want to highlight the fact you're a Canadian company).
Also consider the fact that the country's ccTLD is not popular in every country. In France the .fr is very popular for example, but it's not the case everywhere. I'm not sure the .us is very popular in the us for example, is it?
1. Yes. It’s also a matter of marketing, of course, where the desire to have a .com might trump all other consideration.
2. If a company has no particular local presence in it’s home country, what would the concept of “home” country even mean?
The reason to prefer your own local ccTLD is to have an easier time dealing with any disputes or questions from your TLD registry. I.e. would the registry assume that they can simply contact you (and speak the local language) if anything should arise, then you will have an easier time dealing with that. If you were to be technically registered somewhere, but have no local people and no local presence, or even if your company merely seems to be of foreign origin, the TLD registry (and legal officials in general) might not deal with you very favorably.
First example that comes to mind: many of those shady crypto companies that did "ICOs" in 2017, were based in the US; but the US has regulations that block non-accredited US customers from investing in things like this. So these companies generally just ignored the US market — even blocking US visitors on their website — and instead marketed to people in every other country.
To be honest you're probably right, but considering it can be hard to find a good .com nowadays, I think going for a somewhat well managed newGTLD is a good option.
HOWEVER, doing the work of knowing which registry is reliable can be a bit hard when you're not in the industry yourself.
2. The rules can change somewhat arbitrarily. Or the rules might not change, but their enforcement might.
3. The registries have no incentive to treat their TLD management as a stewardship of a public good; they are in it for the money, and might de-prioritize technical development and/or support to arbitrarily low levels.
Further, TLDs are bought and sold periodically. I haven't seen any gTLDs go away. Is that something you've seen?
Otherwise, the concerns listed seem like FUD with no evidence so far.
.info feels like the most benign above.
But when I read them out, www and .com just feel like some relic from yester-year. But we have gotten used to them to the point we don't necessarily notice.
One of my domains uses the .ch TLD, from Switzerland, I use it for many account registrations via email. Should I be worried that I will lose access and proactively migrate away from this domain?
If you trust them, it’s fine. I would guess they’ll be around for a while.
That's not entirely true. What happens for ccTLDs is that they're owned by the government, and administrative and technical management of the extension is delegated to a foundation/association. In the example of France (I'm French so I know it best), the .fr has been managed by the Afnic historically, but it's renewed every few years (5 I think?) by the government. Last time was 2021.
In the case of ccTLDs you need to trust the associated government no matter what, more than the delegated registry.
Realistically I think you're fine sticking with .ch, but consider one of the original gTLDs for future use (com, net, info, org)
For weird newGTLD the worst that can happen is the registry goes bankrupt and their TLDs are not saved by the ICANN or bought by another registry. In this case you'd lose the domain. IMO it's unlikely to happen to Radix.
The one I co-own is an old-school .com domain. Probably still the best. If costs are your critical issue, maybe you should re-think your plans for having any of it online. We are not talking about a lot of money in any case.
"Changyou" means "freedom to explore", and it's a brand under Sohu, which is popular in China in early days of Internet.
"The intention of the Beijing Gamease Age Digital Technology Co., Ltd. (“Cyou”) in filing this application is to proactively protect the ownership of the “Changyou.com” and “Cyou.com” trademark at the Internet Generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) name space and to provide a trusted, hierarchical and intuitive namespace for registrants and users that use Cyou’s broad range of high-quality entertainment and virtual communities services.
So: the same way you have a state-registered mailing address for official mail etc., you would have a state-registered email address, potentially @city-or-state.country-tld.
Of course you could use whatever email you want but rolling it out in the same process of legal ID means changing the default “paper mail” delivery to email, without having to just manually say “yes I want to receive emails instead” to everything.
That said, I think might make sense as an address system for signing and verification. It'd be nice if I could just sign into a local municipality or state-level server with a national ID to read notices and do verification, instead of walking to the city hall and twice in a week and uploading drivers_license.jpg to weird e-commerce websites on random occasions.
> presumably formed from an ID number of some sort.
One possible solution is that the address for an individual must be obtained from a directory before sending a mail. Allowing for the possibility of changing it in the future. Access to that information can then be granted/revoked by the individual as they see fit. Something similar to re:claimID.
1. Have this "official" email only for communication with "state" entities, or some such filtered allow-list. It would be fantastic to have a high-SNR electronic channel for "all the important govt bureaucratic stuff". Folks could always forward mail to a unified inbox if they wish, but regardless they get an effective filtering tool.
2. For non allow-list entities, charge some trivial amount for every incoming mail that goes unread or gets flagged by a user as spam (or some such). I suspect this will quickly change the economics to make most spray-and-pray crap to become unviable.
In essence, as with any communication system, I think the most important design goal is to have high SNR (Signal-to-Noise Ratio) channels which we can suitably label for specific delineated intents. We shouldn't be treating the inbox as a monolith with all pieces of uniform importance (or dictated by the shiny content of emails); we should be able to leverage IT to have the system work in the user's interest -- it's a matter of setting up incentives/responsibilities.
Uptake has been so limited, it‘s essentially useless.
But, if they did, would that imply that the state ought to provide a free home to anyone who needs it?
Similarly, there's no state requirement to have a smartphone - or even a phone number. I understand that citizens of the USA can qualify for a state-provided phone and number, but I think that's quite rare.
Given that there are a plethora of free email providers, why would the state step in to manipulate this market?
> Similarly, there's no state requirement to have a smartphone - or even a phone number. I understand that citizens of the USA can qualify for a state-provided phone and number, but I think that's quite rare.
True, also -- this is mostly based on my experience in Israel, not the USA, if that was accidentally implied. Here you do have some form of state-registered postal address (and can't remove, only change it), I don't know what homeless people have registered but from a brief check it's ignored if they're homeless. Instead, the city they're staying in handles it.
There's no smartphone requirement, but I'm not sure how they deal with someone who just doesn't have any phone, it's a requirement in a lot of auxiliary services.
> Given that there are a plethora of free email providers, why would the state step in to manipulate this market?
I thought that provisioning it with the relatively-new smart card IDs (i.e. certificate authentication) would allow for better starting security, less hacked accounts and such.
In some few countries & metro areas, people have decided to answer Yes to this question, so it’s not purely rhetorical.
The so called “Obama phones”, not so rare…
They also have low-income landline programs, I believe, along with low-income home internet plans but I think the internet ones are for households with school age children judging by the radio ads I used to hear.
At least the state-registered address is required in many countries.
(Homeless people are still registered. The address might be a homelessness charity, or a whole city district.)
Yes.
Basically, a high SNR channel which can be delineated for specific intent. This can be controlled through allow-lists or whatever.
Even from the state's perspective, this seems like a very cheap solution to what must be a great administrative burden.
The mail system as it is is working. It has been for many years. It costs a non-significant amount of money to send mail, so this takes care of the spam problem: spam exists but isn't free so it isn't profitable. There's no need to have PKI or "personal certificates" infrastructure so even 80-year olds can receive and read mail.
I have a mailbox. The government is obligated to send stuff there. If I move, I can redirect my mail. I would hate to have a (new) obligation to check my "government-assigned" email box (protected by "PKI" or "personal certificate"), or face penalties for not doing that — in addition to my obligation to check my mailbox. My parents would never be able to take care of it, so it would fall (again) on me to check their email boxes as well.
Pay your fee once, and the domain stays active forever.
The cost of running the servers for a top level domain are really small, and probably going down with time, so it should be possible for the domain registrar to keep operations going with just a trickle of new registrations.
As a compromise, perhaps you could charge a nominal fee for domain name ownership transfers.
Forever is good. Especially if you know it is forever than you say thing that you want to say forever.
We can't expect the dead to continue to exert pressure over the living.
I dont care if it eventually gets lost amongst the huge amount of content but I still want my stuff to be out there.
Beyond domain squatters, who would benefit from that?
It means I could maybe publish my memoirs and family tree and have it still available in 500 years.
It also makes web domains like other property - you don't purchase a nice watch and then expect it to be reassigned to someone else if you don't pay your annual watch renewals.
Your property is both relatively scarce, limited, and requires significant service compared to random domains on some random tld.
Everyone would love to have a three- or four-letter domain but, like land, they're not making new characters for the ASCII alphabet.
This usecase makes no sense at all. If you plan to have a server going after you're no longer able to maintain a server, your only option is to pay someone to manage your infrastructure and/or services. Once you're paying some company to manage your infrastructures, managing domains becomes a subitem in your invoice.
To get around the problem of a numeric TLD, I suggest using Roman numerals (and telling Myanmar it has to go back to using .bu).
While I'm sure this would be great for your ego, it makes no actual sense. Very few documents from so long ago are available, not because it was somehow miraculously impossible to preserve documents but because overwhelmingly people don't give a shit.
You are demanding that future people should give a shit, and they aren't going to oblige.
I for one love to read historical documents and primary sources. I'm glad some people in ancient times had the foresight to record a bit of their lives in the hope that future generations might find it interesting.
You always have the option of committing your memoirs to stone, absorbing the long-term cost up front yourself.
I’ve always found personal accounts and memoirs to be the best kind of writing. You get to read beneath the surface between the person they were, the person they wanted to be and the worldly circumstances they found themselves in.
Of course, go far back enough (I'm not sure if 500 years is enough) and mathematically speaking, the number of your ancestors will exceed the population of the world, which shows some other issues that you run into.
Registering a domain is not an issue to anyone.
Some domain name registrars even offer multi-year subscription plans for those who don't want to bother with the 5minute work it takes to extend a subscription, and send out warnings months in advance to renew subscriptions.
I expect all of them, and I'd be very surprised if any domain name registrar didn't offered this feature.
For example, both Namecheap and GoDaddy allow customers to extend domain registrations up to 10 years in one go.
Network Solutions does offer a 100 year plan (and used to offer a 1000 year plan, but I just checked and that one is gone) but the way the implement is by registering for 10 years and then every year for the next 90 years adding a year.
You only really have the domain registered for 10 years, and you are betting the Network Solutions will still be around for 90 more years, and Network Solutions is betting that the price they have to pay for domains in that TLD will not have gone up so much that the total cost of all those extensions is more than what they earned by having your initial large [1] upfront payment invested for 100 years.
My recommendation: register your domain for 10 years. Don't turn on auto-renewal. Add an annual "Check my domain registration" item to your calendar. When that items come up each year either (1) add another year to your domain, or (2) check to see if it is near expiration and add years.
[1] $1600 for 100 years of a random .com.
Do you remember how much the 1000 year plan costed?
That said, this is not something I expect to happen in the regular Web, this seems to be a job for IPFS, blockchain or whatever. With plain HTTP, even if you have your forever domain, you'd still have the issue that the webserver it is pointing to can change, break or just disappear.
What's the benefit of a UUID over a raw IP address?
Not a technical requirement. Subject alternative name (SAN) certificates support IP addresses.
Unlike the Common Name, which is arbitrary human text (so e.g. " oops.example" is a valid name despite that space at the start, as are "c-programming.example\0\0\0" and "Ł0Ł.example") the SANs are defined so that it's harder to screw up and a machine can reliably just bit-for-bit compare the data. There are two main kinds: IpAddress SANs are defined for the IPv4 or IPv6 address just as bits, you can't express 200.300.400.500 as an IpAddress, whereas that's a (stupid but) valid Common Name; DnsName SANs are defined using a restricted character set and as specifically the ASCII LDH DNS hostname subset, which makes it much less tempting to try to incorrectly write a Unicode name here, what's actually required is the ASCII LDH name, ie Punycode.
But neither of these things will ever happen, for approximately the same reason.
as such, a forever registration would have to be a quasi-pyramid scheme where the initial users keep their domains only so long as there are more new users coming in each year than existed in all the past years combined (or something similar depending on charges).
also, what good is a forever domain when it doesn't also have forever hosting? You die, the domain continues on forever, your hosting provider stops hosting and now no-one else can ever use that domain. Kind-of a jerk move in the end.
So not that different than today. You stop paying for your domain and squatters make sure no one can ever register that domain, for a reasonable fee, ever again.
It doesn't have to be a pyramid scheme. The registrar can also invest the money, and use the interest as revenue. So instead of paying 40 USD annually you pay 1000 USD for the initial registration. 4% interest of that would be 40 USD.
IPNS "records" have a TTL so you need someone with the key actively re-publishing them. I guess in theory you could publish for a very long time but you risk issues of someone maliciously re-sharing an older record that hasn't expired.
I guess once you die you can hope that someone has recorded the last version so you can "move" from IPNS to a regular CID. But IDK how much I would want to rely on that for long-term legacy especially if the TTL on your IPNS record is shirt. Although I guess IPNS records are small enough that it would be fairly easy to set up a service that recorded all published IPNS records. Maybe publish it as a merkle tree so it is infeasible to tamper with old records.
The one-time cost for a domain should be substantial, with the capital put into long-term investments like index funds, which are then used to pay domain renewal (and maybe static webhosting) costs year after year.
If people can set up trust funds for their families and estates, I don't see why it's not possible to do a niche "trust fund" for websites.
Happy to have someone steal my idea. :)
Vitalik Buterin wrote an interesting analysis about how to allocate scarce domains, contrasting unstoppable’s approach with recurring demand based fees:
https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/should-there-be-de...
Maybe make a new TLD specifically for infinitely lasting names, say .permanent, and make all top level names under that be 128 bit numbers in some text format randomly generated when you register the domain such as hex or base64. E.g., f560618f355b0ddf560456d41d635e3d.permanent or 9WBhjzVbDd9WBFbUHWNePQ==.permanent.
With those names it doesn't matter that they get locked up forever with the initial registrant.
> As a compromise, perhaps you could charge a nominal fee for domain name ownership transfers.
When the name is generated also generate a public/private key pair and associate the public key with the name at the top level servers. Someone is considered to own the domain if they can prove that they have the corresponding private key.
The top level would allow someone who has the private key to ask for a new key pair to be generated to replace the current one.
Want to transfer ownership? Give the new owner the private key and they can use it to do a key change.
This should allow making the top level service entirely automated and cheap to run.
We had that for the .ro TLD. What happened was that a lot of useful domain names got acquired by random entities and sat there unused. And i don't mean "you can have this domain for $5K" unused, properly unused.
They switched to a yearly fee model (about 1/5 of what the forever fee was, plus credit if you paid the forever fee in the past 5 years) and that seems to have cleaned up the space a bit.
Requiring periodic renewal ensures that the entity that is responsible for the domain is still alive, and still wants it. Allowing an entity to register a domain forever creates the possibility of zombie domains, registered forever through a registrar who has long since gone bust, by a registrant who long ago lost their password... but the registry is obliged to still maintain the last state of that domain's NS records forever.
Nobody would be able to initiate a transfer; nobody would be able to buy the domain off the owner... the resource would be permanently dead.
But "eu.org" is not a TLD.
If I were looking to register a domain for 10 years, the last thing I would do is put myself at the mercy of a middleman peddling subdomains.
EU.org cannot be recommended for longevity.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/registering-and-renewing-eu-doma...
> do not expire
The current expiration date for all eu.org domains is 2026-08-08[2].
It's expensive: > $200,000 to apply, ~$50,000 / yr to maintain, plus $0.25 / yr per domain. [1]
You could run such a system on ads, but you could also do the Let's Encrypt / completely open route where you raise money and build up an endowment to run in perpetuity.
Imagine how cool Twitter would be if you had "username.twitter". Or could email "whatever@username.twitter" (or "username@twitter"). Same with gmail, etc.
I've also thought about registering one in my first name and keeping it to myself. It's super nerdy and way cooler than an NFT or ".eth" domain.
For 1yr.
$250 000 first year and $52 500 in following years = 91 years until the money runs out. Of course there is no doubt other costs involved, but you'd make it past a year.
Would just be insanely fun to play with & ruin other developers days when I complain that their form isn’t accepting my email. And really just generally confusing everyone.
Maybe someday :)
[0] I looked it up, it should be possible!! https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40349412/why-do-not-more...
"For the newer gTLDs, like .google, ICANN's application rules specify that they must not have A or MX records (apart from temporarily the special "if you used this name internally you're about to have a problem" records before the gTLD went live)."
just like this, the shortest website url that still works?
(Note that all registries are continuously escrowing data on all domains on their TLDs on a daily basis for precisely this reason.)
As such ask a friend to point a subdomain your way.
And if you were to add your domain to the public suffix list (https://publicsuffix.org/) it would effectively be treated like a domain name rather than subdomain name within browsers for JS security, etc.
For example, if you look at the list: https://publicsuffix.org/list/public_suffix_list.dat
You'll notice that myshopify.com is on there... effectively allowing subdomains of that (customer specific, each customer does not trust other customers) is now treated like a domain so that customer1.myshopify.com and customer2.myshopify.com are both isolated from each other by apps and systems that utilise the PSL (all major browsers, etc).
OVH are pretty big and decent and unlikely to go away any time soon.
https://porkbun.com/products/domains
Scan down the list looking for sale pricing in renewal column. Occasionally there is 2-3 dollar pa stuff there and you can buy 10 years of that
Also if you meet the nationality requirements netcup does easter sales that have perpetual euro per year .de domains. .de isn't entirely clogged yet so you can get a short-ish name for dev purposes
Not well known as it doesn't seem to have a translated page for it but OVH offers a free 10MB hosting with 1 email account for each domain registered with them [1].
Then again for US folk this is untenable because of data caps that could be blown by dos attacks. Personally free.fr gets me 5Gb down, 1Gb up for 50 euros a month, so maybe some getting your internet infrastructure up to date is in order first.
This doesn't really work, if you're behind carrier grade NAT and inbound traffic gets dropped.
For example, I tried having a homelab where 2 of my servers would be publicly accessible, could join Docker Swarm/Kubernetes clusters that would be controlled from other cloud VPSes or vice versa, but couldn't really do that.
I did actually document how I worked around it by having 2 cheap VPSes with static IP addresses that forwarded traffic to my local servers, with the local servers being the ones to establish the connection with WireGuard in my blog post "How to publicly access your homelab behind NAT": https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/how-to-publicly-access-you...
Of course, forwarding all ports (even if most are closed) might be a little bit insane and the article could be written better, but definitely not everyone gets publicly accessible IPs from their ISP without opening their wallet and forking over some cash (getting a VPS and using WireGuard was easier).
Then again, having a homelab and using personal hardware for hosting non-essential stuff is a pretty great approach! You'll most likely be able to get resources much cheaper than renting VPSes from most providers (especially AWS, Azure and GCP) would be in the long term. That said, things like my homepage or blog are hosted "in the cloud" due to this allowing me to break my homelab or have maintenance windows whenever I want without inconveniencing anyone.
What an interesting statement. It's certainly called an Internet connection in all of the marketing materials and is regarded as such by everyone that I've talked to. I guess it's a case of most people's standards and thus common parlance being vastly different to what someone else might expect. Then again, self hosting is a niche thing to do, so that's understandable.
In addition, one could even argue that giving people's devices public IP addresses might be a bit problematic in the first place, from a security point of view - in University every device that I connected to the network got a public IP address and without fail any with an SSH server was the subject of attacks not long after.
Though the real explanation is probably one that has to do with finances and the lack of IPv4 addresses, as well as the fact that IPv6 adoption in Latvia is basically non-existent, from what I can tell.
I recently had to write an email to my local police station (xx@polizei.nrw.de) and their server was rejecting it because my IP (vultr) was on the "Proofpoint® Dynamic Reputation"-blacklist. I owned this single IPv4 for at least 3 years, so they whole vultr range must have been blocked by Proofpoint.
Great if you can't even contact your government because they are using some shitty blocklist product.
Personally, I run a mailcow instance with Rspamd and get only very few spam mails, albeit my email was being leaked in the ledger.com hack a few years ago. When I was still using mailbox.org, I got crypto spam mails (update your wallet yada yada) in my inbox twice a day. So just a configuration thing(?).
Gave up hosting my own, just not worth the headaches.
Especially annoying is that in some cases filters blocking my mail are used on the postmaster address too, so to resolve an issue I have to use my gmail address.
For low-volume home use, I definitely recommend just outsourcing SMTP to a company that does it professionally.
I wonder how this is legal. Then again, I guess them throwing snail mail into the trash or refusing to open letters from particular individuals (as an example) would carry a different weight than some technical solution that nobody understands acting badly, with no particular person really being "responsible" for it.
first, it seems unfair.
second, I just got a .cx and plan to use it for email, I hope I don't have issues with it.
I’m clearly in the wrong business.
I've used their service in the past and as far as i recall, it worked flawlessly...
Confirms my theory: everything ICANN touches turns to poop.
eu.org !
If you have to perform a maintenance task once every 10 years, you will not remember to do it (reminder mechanisms are not really designed and tested for such long intervals).
It’s also extremely unlikely that all the business entities involved will still be in their current form. It’s possible that the new business will have lost the information reach out to you to remind you. You might have moved, changed email or phone numbers.
You might have died, your family depends on the domain, and they lose their email one day because the MX record expired.
The whole industry can change in just a few years; 10 year renewal seems like a bad idea to me.
Most of the current TLDs are a waste. My clients all want .com addresses because that’s what “customers understand”.
The wholesale price for .uk domains is £3.90/year[0] so where does the £100 for ten years figure come from?
[0] https://www.nominet.uk/change-to-uk-domain-wholesale-prices/
I looked at a couple of my normal registrars and they were about a tenner per year per .uk domain.
If you can find one for under a fiver (for multi year) please let me know.
"At cost" (allegedly):
I do not remember how often you need to renew, but I do know that their service is not maliciously commercial like Freenom.
If the domain is stolen, it will end up potentially costing you thousands to get it back. And that’s if you don’t use it for a website.
If you want to use it as a real domain, you have to pay a premium price.
The .feedback problem is more I like to have a domain for a static site under github. I do not mind basic hosting service. But it is nicer if I just escape it to the github one.
For decade … I probably would be gone or not active. Done it guys. Hence no concern.
It's such a breeze developing even complex webapps with it like my project collanon.app