Edit, Solved in comments 👌
I want to buy a domain name for personal usage (reverse proxy, selfhosting serivces). I’ll probably go with a general purpose .net or my country specifc one. I am based in Northern Europe.
- Does it matter based on where I am located where the domain is registered?
- Any recommendations for domain registrars in that regard?
Thanks
Porkbun! There are many to pick from but from my experience Porkbun includes everything you need out of the box at no additional cost. Namecheap has very good first year deals, but after that it almost doubles in price.
Which registrar you pick initially doesn’t matter too much. I started with Namecheap then moved to Porkbun after a year with them (Completely free to move, but you’ll have to buy an extra year if you move tho)
Don’t use GoDaddy though. I was searching for a domain on that site and after a few minutes it was taken.
There are reasons to avoid GoDaddy, but what you experienced isn’t really a GoDaddy-specific problem. If a domain gets registered on one provider, it will be unavailable on all providers. Unless you are accusing them of falsely saying they were taken but are available for purchase at a premium. I don’t think I’ve heard of them doing that, but who knows what kind of greedy tactics corporations will try these days.
It was initially available. I checked multiple websites to compare prices/services. And when I entered it into GoDaddy.com, the domain was bought. I checked the WHOIS out of curiosity and coincidentally it’s owned by a GoDaddy subsidiary.
I’ve never heard any confirmation of GoDaddy falsely charging a premium for domains, but I definitely experienced that kind of thing with them years ago. Wasn’t really a “few-minutes” thing, but if you left a domain in your cart, within a day or so, it would be sold and available at a premium. Not sure if it was a GoDaddy tactic, or if their data was being sold and used by resellers.
My two issues with porkbun:
They don’t seem to support wildcard/catch all email forwarding
Dynamic DNS is done with an API key that has access to the entire account(!!!)
Though, I might move to them anyway (just moved a domain to namecheap which I used years ago and wow their ux sucks, and they don’t support dane or sshfp, Google domains was really good rip)
Maybe you could use a provider that isn’t your domain registrar? I personally use Cloudflare.
I’m pretty sure you can setup Dynamic DNS with Cloudflare. I don’t personally use that feature, but they have a ton of DNS configurations for you to choose. My domain’s email is also managed by Cloudflare. And it’s completely free!