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votes
Where/how should I acquire a .com domain for three years in advance?
So I wanna purchase a domain for my personal website (just a WordPress thing), and I wanna pay for three years in advance (I have my reasons). Which domain sellers are reasonably priced, trustworthy, and more likely to assist a less technical, non-developer user like myself?
Thanks!
I think Namecheap allows for that.
They also host Wordpress, if you're looking for that.
I've been with them for a year, no complaints so far.
Interesting, I thought they only did domains. I was thinking of using Hostinger because price is a concern.
I can only speak to registrations, but I really like https://porkbun.com. They've got $5 .coms right now with
COVIDCARE22.You can use https://tld-list.com/ to search a wide range of tlds and it'll list promo codes. :)
tld-list is amazing. Thanks for dropping that!
I love it. I've got a bunch of cheap domains for one-off things -- like https://rickety.cricket (if you're familiar with It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) along with some proper ones. I love looking for sweet domains.
Thanks. This coupon is not valid anymore. I'll see if I can find another one!
looks like you might not need a code, actually. I like porkbun, though. The backend is super simple and they don't flood you with upsells or anything. They're a smaller company, too, which is nice.
Another one, Namecheap as served me well: website and e-mail domain. Namecheap also have promos when you are a first user subscribing to a .com (or other domain, you just have to search). But tomf, already wrote above, use tld-list! Do not choose GoDaddy!
GoDaddy is on my permanent shit list because of SOPA.
It's the same for me.
I've had no issues with Gandi and HN seems to recommend it as well. They do unfortunately charge much much higher renewal fees compared to buying, say, a decade in one go.
I've been using Gandi for my personal domain for years. They also host my email. They're a great company and I've had no issues with them. I renew my domain and forget about it until I have to deal with it again a year later. It's a pretty reputable company, which I think is important in this space.
You can purchase/renew your domains for up to 10 years and (since you mentioned in another comment) it allows you to pay in currencies most companies don't. My country's currency also fluctuates, almost as much as Bitcoin, so Gandi's service comes cheaper to me. They also have easy Wordpress hosting, so if you're lucky in the currency front, I'd say Gandi would be the perfect choice for your needs.
not sure if its still true, but Gandi also does the paperwork so you can get some TLDs not typically available. I had issues years ago with a .es domain -- only a few registrars had a way to make it available to me.
Yep, that's true. In fact, as someone who was not at all knowledgeable in this area at the time, I had not even heard of Gandi until I needed a TLD that only Gandi offered. I lucked into them. The TLD is now offered by a few other companies but I see no reason to switch.
Another recc for Namecheap. Reasonable pricing, understandable interface, options for automatic renewal. (Basically the same as paying in advance)
Yeah... Auto renewal is not exactly the same for me, due to personal issues and the instability of my country's currency in relation to the US dollar.
But I'm seen now that namecheap allows payment in advance for up to 5 years!
I think some (Porkbun, Gandi) allow you to pay in advance for 10 years :)
I also use Namecheap. Been with them for 10 years. Have had good experiences with their tech support.
Not sure what you're doing with WP exactly, but if your use case is basic enough, you might consider publishing it as a static site to an object storage provider like S3 (personally I use and recommend DigitalOcean, whose service is S3-compatible). This can save you a ton of money and dramatically increase your protection against WordPress hacks.
It does require some technical know-how to set up, which you mentioned isn't your strong suit. Still wanted to toss it out there as something worth consideration. Far too many people get hacked and lose control of their WP sites, and don't have the knowledge to clean up the mess themselves. If a static site is functional enough for your needs, the cost and security benefits will be well worth it.
Thanks for answering.
A few months ago I managed to publish a website using Hugo and Github Pages. It wasn't exactly easy. It felt good to succeed, but now I don't even remember all the steps it took.
A static site would be advantageous for many reasons, including the much cheaper (or free) hosting. But I wonder if that would require more work than I'm willing to put in. Besides, I wanna be able to post from anywhere, in any computer, with no setup. It would be a drag if I had to setup Git+repo every time I had to publish or edit from a place other than my Linux machine. And if I had to fix or "debug" something I'd be pretty much on my own.
That said, I'm considering Github Pages or the Netfly free tier. I may not be a programmer, but I've been using Linux and Emacs for years. I'm good at following instructions.
I don't think I would need to pay for static hosting. Only for WordPress.
So here’s something I did: I installed WP on a low-tier DigitalOcean droplet (VPS instance), and pointed a secret subdomain at it. Put the whole thing behind an authwall with .htpasswd so only I could get to it. I didn’t go as far as to shut it off when not using it, but that would’ve been a cost-saving option too.
I used this S3-compatible fork of the “simply-static” plug-in to handle all the publishing. This was years ago, and that repo is getting pretty dusty but it may still be viable. Normally, for security reasons, I wouldn’t recommend any WP plug-ins that aren’t actively maintained, but in this case the whole WP install is basically firewalled so as long as the functionality you need is working I consider it safe.
With an approach like this everything’s in the cloud and you can manage it from anywhere, but you still get the benefits of the static site generation.
Yeah...that seems nice but clearly above my pay grade already :/
Thanks.
Something that could be fun to try is a GitHub Actions powered static site. You could write your articles using GitHub issues. A pipeline could run when an issue is created, edited or deleted. It could generate the site for you and do the commits automatically. I might give that a try at some point as a weekend project.
Normally you can buy .com for many years in bulk in most popular registrars. I use name.com because they have TLDs namecheap doesn't have (that I need) and they've been fairly reliable throughout the years (since the distant past in which I left the awful awful godaddy), however, I too recommend namecheap for your requirements!
Do note that name.com's DNS servers show ads on any unused domains and non-existent subdomains.
I've never used their DNS servers myself. Thanks for pointing it out.