Good domain registrars and email hosting bred

「 Fristi 」

So today I found out Gandi.net got bought up by a shitty company that is turning gandi hosting to shit. Free email boxes no more. Now you gotta pay 5 euro per email account per month. Not cool Gandi!

So let's have a suggestions thread. Suggest good webhosts, domain registrars and such things.
For that matter, I am looking to move my email accounts somewhere where I don't have to pay 500 euro per year for them. All suggestions welcome.

toast

「 Fristi 」 Porkbun is american but otherwise alright for registrars.
Migadu is good for emails, you only pay for usage, but get unlimited mailboxes / addresses / domains / etc.
As for webhosts, I uh, don't really use those ^^

Hélène

I don't recommend Namecheap (bad experience with it, they don't care about security, they're a shitty company, etc.)
I haven't tried Porkbun yet.

I use Migadu for email; it was recommended to me, it's quite good. Haven't had any problems with it except one time it went down for less than an hour... the only time in a year. They're fairly cheap (cheapest is $19/year and it's comfortable for me) and nearby (Switzerland). Their webmail is decent, but I don't use it, since I prefer native clients. They are fairly featureful, and I use their subdomain features a bunch (for example, fedi@username.example.com can translate to username+fedi@example.com, if you enable it). They let you register multiple domains on one Migadu account, and many email addresses, with aliases and a bunch of other features.

So far, I'm running only a VPS on OVH. They refuse to give you more than one IPv6 on a VPS. I know you get a full range on a physical machine (e.g. Kimsufi). But for some reason, you can buy more IPv4, which I really don't care about. They're IMO quite behind in many ways but I don't know of any competitor that's decently priced and also nearby (and not AWS-style).

「 Fristi 」

Hélène tbh namecheap is a pretty terrible company, in the same league as godaddy (they seem to have a lot of smaller subcompanies under their name that do a lot of shitty stuff like domain squatting). Porkbun looks nice and I would consider it, if only it wasn't hosted in the US. I'd rather not have my data being subject to PRISM.

I'll take migadu under consideration as it does give me some options on possibly hosting mail accounts for subcon.town members in the future. However I would need to look for where to register my domain names as I'm not leaving them with gandi after they pulled their little stunt. Alternatively I also did find obambu.com which seems to be another french webhost, their email hosting plans also seems to be quite competitive, but I have no idea how good of a company they are.

ilja

For mail, I know https://nubo.coop/nl/ exists. It's not a webhost or registrar, but more of a "cloud for everyday people". A bit like how google provides mail and storage, but floss, coop, and privacy respecting. I don't use it myself, but some people I know worked closely with it. It should be possible to bring your own domain and set aliases. But I'm unsure how many aliases and I don't know about multiple domains. And that's all still an alias to the same box.

For registrar I'm also looking. Where possible, I prefer to switch to coops or non-profits, but all I find is the one who also own the .coop tld and it gives me too corpo vibes to immediately switch (although I might eventually if I don't find anything better).

Hélène

ilja I've heard of Nubo but haven't used them (funny how they're both FR/NL, and apparently that's surprisingly common, not sure why); I think it's not for me personally, but I could see people being interested in a Nextcloud hosted by a cooperative. As they explain it, they seem to think of individuals first, and seemed to have arranged for small groups later, including families, which really hinders it, IMO. They also don't seem to be exactly even yet, though that could happen depending on how popular they are. The cooperative is interesting, however.
Honestly, the main gripe I have with it is that I don't feel like I could recommend a third-party "cloud for people" solution if I can't assure people their data is secure and at least encrypted in a decent manner; which they don't do (and it seems to be more of a Nextcloud issue, really, but it does impact them).

I'm still looking for registrars as well, but I haven't seen anything interesting, and I've looked. It seems no one handles this stuff. (I would start one but I can't, sadly...)

「 Fristi 」 You'll still get PRISM bullshit for the simple reason that the TLDs are usually owned by American companies. The safest you could do is using ccTLDs with a local registrar, or use Njalla...

I've never heard of obambu, they claim they've been around for 10 years. I don't like "PHP hosting solutions" personally (mostly because I don't really run PHP code, and because they tend to be poorly setup and exploitable). The reviews don't seem too good:

"tech support doesn't know anything about what they run"
"they claim it's a dedicated IP, but everything's mutualised"
"one week for a domain transfer, if it even works"
"commercial support doesn't answer, I still have nothing after paying"
"server failures almost every day"
"their email servers are blacklisted"
etc etc

「 Fristi 」

So I ended up transferring most of my domains to the dutch webhost cloud86. They seem to be pretty competent as far as I can see, with a decent client portal where you can see and manage the services you use from them, and the more technical bits you can manage using Plesk. I set up my domains with a single email hosting plan that allows me to manage 50 inboxes total, for up to 10 domains and with a total of 50GB storage for all inboxes combined. No limits on messages per day (though they have a 250 per hour limit to prevent abuse). Works perfectly so far.

Also they do domain privacy by default, so none of your private info gets leaked through whois.

Hélène

You'll still get PRISM bullshit for the simple reason that the TLDs are usually owned by American companies.

True, although I'm not sure how much they'd get just from the TLDs. I suppose the worst I'd have to worry about is that they can just pull the plug on the domains. Does having a domain name with a TLD from the US route any traffic there for them to snoop on? (In case you haven't noticed, I have no idea how TLDs work :derp: )

mycelium

Several people I know fly from Gandi to go at Infomaniak.
They are Swiss and well reputed (I never heard anything bad on them), I might go there for registrar.

Hélène

mycelium They seem interesting, but cost double the price for my domain + WHOIS privacy is not free 🫠 at that price for a domain I'd go with Njalla

them being Swiss is quite the argument they like to sell
I wish they had more info on their offers though (like the VPS ones, what's the bandwidth, do they allow SMTP, what's the scheduling, etc) and they also only offer outdated Fedora versions 😔

「 Fristi 」

Hélène curious, what tld do you use that costs double? The .nl domains there are cheap as hell. Even cheaper than on dutch webhosters and those usually sell them for the cheapest. Though on the other hand, not really a fan of things like "DNS Fast Anycast" to "accelerate access to my website worldwide" like wtf does that even mean :thonk: at least they do seem to add 1 free email address to a domain. Not sure what their other email hosting costs are tho.

Hélène

「 Fristi 」 my main domain, the one and only (.moe); but I won't be going with them, I will probably end up trying out Porkbun, considering the options available so far...

ilja

「 Fristi 」 It's been a while since you did the move. I'm thinking of also moving my domains (only domains) to Cloud86. I remember you talked about the move and that it went smoothly bc you could setup the DNS things ahead of transfer and already move to their name servers. Are there other (good or bad) experiences you've had since that could be interesting to know?

johann

Well how the traffic is actually routet is another heapload of shenanigans and depends a lot on the ISP of the person trying to reach you and how they are cooperating with the ISP of your service provider and their peerings with other ISPs. That happens on a lower level than DNS though.

I'm not sure how the policy of registrars and so on works for top level domains and I suspect its different for different TLDs. I can say for example that eurID who run the .eu TLD require an email address of the registrant and as far as I was aware at the time there was no option for WHOIS privacy for .eu domains. So you can go find my email address on their website. Not sure if that's in the direction of what Helene meant?

「 Fristi 」

johann

there was no option for WHOIS privacy for .eu domains

good fucking job EU :baa:

oh well, at least I don't use .eu domains. I remember when SIDN (the org that runs .nl) wanted to know where you live and everything, and pretty much displayed all that shit in the WHOIS information. You had a .nl website? Oh boy I hope you registered it on something else than your home address. Luckily they stopped doing that eventually; these days they don't give out any private information to whois, so you don't even need whois privacy anymore for .nl domains.

luckily I do get whois privacy at cloud86 (I think gandi also does that by default). It hides everything, even the email address you registered with.

「 Fristi 」

ilja tbh the only thing I can say is that everything works and I don't really have any issues with it. The only thing to keep in mind is that you don't get free email addresses with a domain name, you need to buy a separate email hosting plan for that. I got the middle pick which is good for 5 domain names and about 50gb of storage (in total for all email accounts) I think. Works great.

toast

I've recently (a few months) been trying netim and honestly I don't have anything to complain about.
They focus more on the registrar thing and all of the other "side" things are more like "I guess we have to provide these", but that works for me since I don't want those anyway.
It's french though so up to you if that's what you want :^)