Owners of a domain, which domain registrar did you choose and why?

AlexPewMaster@lemmy.zip to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 182 points –

I'm currently on the lookout for privacy-respecting domain registrars. What are you guys using and why?

Edit: I've registered my domain with Porkbun. I got a really cool one, it's called reallyaweso.me!

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If a registrar goes out of business, ICANN transfers the domain(s) to another registrar.

If a name server business fails, you change name servers through your registrar.

You can't really fix registrar services in your name server, nor name server problems through your registrar. (Unless, of course, your registrar is also your name server.)

If your registrar goes down but the NS are on a different provider, the root servers will keep that NS record and all will be well. You can go to a different registrar and transfer it over, but in the meantime it'll be fine and you can do whatever you need with your DNS.

If the DNS provider goes down, you can go to your registrar and quickly change the NS to another provider. It'll quickly be back up on your new DNS servers.

Believe me, I've done this for 3 decades because one or the other have gone down on me more than once and I've had minimal downtime with this separation. Even when I was running my own NS, I kept more than one NS outside my server farm so if my connections went down, I could pop the farm up on a backup colo and point my tertiary accordingly.

After a bit of research, I'm forced by facts (NS records can be cached for an undetermined time) to see what you're saying. Thank you for teaching me.

The workings are, of course, a bit more complicated than what either of us have said (here's a taste), but there is a situation as you describe, where separating the registrar from the name servers, and the name servers from the domain, could save the domain from going down.

Well, I kinda simplified it, but yes, the root servers will keep the NS records as long as nothing else updates it (or nobody requests it for longer than the TTL that came with the last lookup) which is why it works.

Happy to help.