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Comment by hackcasual | Hacker News Reader

There's a ton of gTLDs too, I just grabbed a cheap one and ACME-fied all my lan services

Are there any that actually stay cheap, though? Any time I've bought one they've cranked the price after a year.

… .net? (<$15/y for the registration.)

The following TLDs are $3.98/yr (not an initial discount, that's just the price) with Cloudflare Registrar according to https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/17lpxa6/cloudflare_...:

  - .bid
  - .download
  - .date
  - .loan
  - .men
  - .party
  - .stream
  - .trade
  - .win

You could probably get away with using a few of these for a home network, though some would be kinda strange (.men? .loan?)

LOcal Area Network? Low Orbit Area Network?

For a small network; a router, a single server hosting stuff, an AP, and whatever wireless clients: Low On Actual Network.

It's a lottery with these novelty TLDs. If you use them, setup your configuration such that you can move to another TLD easily.

.nets and .coms increase in price too, but they don't tend to jump by 100% in a single year like these novelty ones, which were created purely to make money for the registry.

e.g. https://tld-list.com/blog/tld-wholesale-price-increase-2023

  TLD         Old     New     Percent  Date
  .reviews    $17.00  $40.00  135.29%  2023-10-04
  .furniture  $38.00  $80.00  110.53%  2023-10-04
  .faith      $4.98   $9.98   100.40%  2023-09-04
  .racing     $4.98   $9.98   100.40%  2023-09-04
  .review     $4.98   $9.98   100.40%  2023-09-04
  .science    $4.98   $9.98   100.40%  2023-09-04

Numerical 6 to 9 digit .xyz domains are 0.99 cents a year, $10 for 10 years.

…or alternatively simply buy a domain for 5 or 10 years.

Not all TLDs will let you do that.

That's what I did with a couple .uk domains from Cloudflare. I bought ten years at $4.30 per year so I don't have to worry about renewal price increases for a long time. I also liked that it was suck a short TLD and not from some sketchy country.

> they've cranked the price after a year.

Define 'cranked'.

I spend way more in a bar in one night than on my domains yearly, so I always find 'oh I need one super-duper cheap, below $2/y otherwise it's way too much' comments a bit.. too frugal.

It’s more the principle of the thing… if I buy a domain for $3 and it’s $30 next year, I’m just going to switch my stuff over to .com or .net where the price is predictable.

I also spend more in a bar in one night than on charging my phone for whole year. If the cost to charge it went up by 10x I would still be displeased though.

> If the cost to charge it went up by 10x I would still be displeased though.

Sure anyone would be, but... maybe don't choose .furniture[0] as the TLD for your own small private LAN DNS and don't have the unpleasant surprises?

The prices for the registrations (and renew) are going up steadily (just like everything else? inflation is a thing), but there is always an option to get the information about the renewal price upfront and maybe even use the multi-year sale.

Just looked in Dynadot's CSV, there are ~100 TLDs with sub $10 renewals and additional ~100 with < $15.

Also dug my records[1], privacy is baked in now, so the total effective rise is $1 for `.one` and... -$2 for `.com`.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40571805

[1]

    date created: 2015/08/20
    <placeholder>.com - domain renewal
    1 year ($10.99)
    <placeholder>.com - domain privacy
    1 year ($3.00)
    PAYMENT
    final cost:   $13.99

    date created: 2016/07/21
    <placeholder>.one - domain renewal
    1 year ($10.99)
    <placeholder>.one - domain privacy
    1 year ($3.00)
    PAYMENT
    final cost:   $13.99

    Date created: 2023/09/08
    <placeholder>.com - Domain Renewal
    1 year ($11.99) $11.99

    Date created: 2023/10/16
    <placeholder>.one - Domain Renewal
    1 year ($14.99) $14.99

While I personally would stick to reputable TLDs for anything you want to keep I still think that a 10x price increase on any TLD is super sketchy, especially when it isn't communicated up-front to buyers. My comment was just about those super high rises that to me feel like they are exploiting people who can't easily switch. It was not intended to be about slight price adjustments to match inflation, rising operating costs and the like.

The real question is: Why should people have to pay to some registrar for an internal-use only home network anyway just to avoid nasty security warnings – even if it's not very much by the somewhat dubious benchmark of "cheaper than a night of drinking"?

You always have an option to run an internal PKI, without paying anyone.

The public PKI is built on the public DNS system. If you want a cert to be trusted by default and don't want to bother with your own internal PKI then you need to leverage the existing public infrastructure, which doesn't give it away as a free beer but sells it.

Have you tried that with various devices these days? It's getting increasingly difficult to convince various mobile OSes to accept internal root CAs (largely for good reasons, but that's a different discussion).

> you need to leverage the existing public infrastructure, which doesn't give it away as a free beer but sells it.

No, it's the opposite these days. The existing PKI these days is free (Letsencrypt and others), but getting a public domain that any browser-acceptable CA will issue certificates for isn't. Your domain registration/renewal fees don't pay for that PKI.

I think it's urgently needed for browser vendors, the IETF etc. to get together and figure out a solution for accessing "mymediocreiotdevice.home" without a barrage of "zomg no HTTPS!!", "zomg self-signed cert!" etc. warnings, as these will only desensitize users further to actual problems on publicly-accessible sites.

>No, it's the opposite these days

This is what I said in the first place - public DNS is not free. The costs to get in range but the minimal isn't that much ($5/year to be precise), so the question is between any amount at and no at all.

I did this for a while back when freenom existed. Then, I moved and learned that I was exceptionally lucky to have working loopback NAT in my previous house, and would have to split off a local.<domain> entry for clients on the internal network. No idea why most ISPs don't have routers that work like that.

I haven't bothered doing DNS auth to get certs since I started using paid domains.

You.BEAUTY - https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt

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