And when Cloudflare decides your account is suspicious? No phone support, no escalation, domains held hostage. I have seen it on r/sysadmin three times this year. Cost price is not free if you factor in risk.
I pay Namecheap (https://www.namecheap.com) for mine. Not the cheapest. Human answers the phone. That has value.
Member
Speaking of sticker shock, has anyone checked IPv4 lease prices lately? My HostHatch Zurich instance just got a /29 surcharge notification. The address market is eating "cheap" hosting alive. TLD renewal jumps are the same phenomenon: the loss leader phase ends, reality returns.
I keep .ch domains for local projects. Switch.ch pricing is boringly predictable. Boring is good.
Member
I moved everything to INWX last year. German company, proper VAT invoice, no surprise renewal. .de domains are €5.90 every year, no promo games. For .xyz I would let it die, the registry is notorious for this pricing pattern.
Also their API actually works. Unlike some registrars I could mention.
Contabo .ovh is €13.50 yes but check if that includes VAT for your country. For me in UK it adds 20% so actually €16.20. Still cheaper than some but not the headline price.
I use them for VPS in Nuremberg, no complaints for price. Domain pricing is whatever.
Following this thread because I have 6 .xyz from the $1 era all coming up for renewal. Spreadsheet says $90 total if I keep them. For hobby projects. Ouch.
Might keep 2 and kill 4. The treadmill is real.
Member OP
Mano this is exactly my situation kkkkk the spreadsheet does not lie
I think I keep the .xyz for CDN tests and let the portfolio one die. Maybe I buy .me or something for portfolio, more professional anyway? .xyz was cool in 2022 now looks like cheap
Thank you all for the advices
.me is $20+ renewal most places now, be careful. The cheap promo cycle is not unique to .xyz.
I went through this last year with .club and .site. Now I only buy domains where I know the 5-year cost. Porkbun shows this upfront.
I escaped shared hosting and thought I was smart buying $1 domains. Now I have 11 domains across 5 registrars and I spend more time managing them than I did managing cPanel accounts.
Consolidation is the real answer. Pick one registrar that doesn't suck, pay the boring price, move on with your life.
From SRE perspective: domain hopping creates real operational risk. Certificate transparency logs, HSTS preload, email reputation all accumulate on a domain. "Let it die and buy new" is fine for a static portfolio, but if anyone actually linked to you, you just burned that trust graph.
For production I pay sticker price. For experiments I use subdomains of a stable domain. Cost: $0. Risk: contained.
Member
In Poland we have .pl from NASK, very stable price about 40 PLN per year. For international I use OVHcloud, they have datacenter in Warsaw so latency is good.
The $1 TLD promotions are like tanie serwery that become not tanie after first month. I learned this with VPS, same with domains.
