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Best privacy friendly, reliable and affordable domain name extension ?

Question after reading this new article : https://www.dutchnews.nl/2024/01/criticism-as-dutch-domain-registry-plans-move-to-amazon-cloud/

My current preferences :

  • Not more expensive than two euros a month
  • Whois information cloaking
  • Not profiting from some Pacific Island money deal
  • Privacy friendly

Edit : Found a spreadsheet by EFF from 2017 which gives some insights : https://www.eff.org/wp/which-internet-registries-offer-best-protection-domain-owners

delirious_owl ,
@delirious_owl@discuss.online avatar

Didn't the guy who made piratebay start a domain registry?

lemmyreader OP ,

Yes : https://njal.la/

delirious_owl ,
@delirious_owl@discuss.online avatar

1.25 EUR/month. I think this is your solution, op

delirious_owl ,
@delirious_owl@discuss.online avatar

Is there anything bad about namecheap?

lemmyreader OP ,

Namecheap gets good reviews as far as I know but not sure I'd like to go with anything USA based if I can avoid that.

makeasnek ,
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

.onion

delirious_owl ,
@delirious_owl@discuss.online avatar

Free, more secure, and only accessible by ~2% of Internet users

lemmyreader OP ,

Interesting choice, thanks. I guess for email with an onion domain I'd have to self host the email.

vfosnar ,
@vfosnar@beehaw.org avatar

Yeah but this way you can only communicate with other Tor users. Also the mail server can prolly easily leak your actual IP if you don't harden it well.

neutron ,

The .onion means it's an onion service. This requires a Tor connection both for the host and the users. And frankly, hosting an onion service is not exactly easy to do it right, due to additional security considerations. Many self hosting guides assume a typical residential connection or a rented VPS without an onion service.

just_another_person ,

Take them offline?

Deckweiss , (edited )

njal.la

created by the pirate bay founder Peter Sunde.

I had a great experience with the service so far, no hoops to jump through, no obfuscated pricing, no personal data.

Their VPN and Server options are very pricey, but the domain prices are great.

I may have misunderstood your question. If you are looking specifically for a top level domain, I think .org is a decent one, as it is hosted by a non profit organization (even though there were some sellout debates in 2020)

lemmyreader OP ,

Njalla, thanks.

darkmatternoodlecow ,

You do not own the domain yourself if you register it through Njalla.

SecurityPro ,
@SecurityPro@lemmy.ml avatar

Can you provide a source for this information?

darkmatternoodlecow ,

https://njal.la/faq/

SecurityPro ,
@SecurityPro@lemmy.ml avatar

Context (from the FAQ):

"We're not actually a domain name registration service, we're a customer to these. We sit in between the domain name registration service and you, acting as a privacy shield.

When you purchase a domain name through Njalla, we own it for you. However, the agreement between us grants you full usage rights to the domain. Whenever you want to, you can transfer the ownership to yourself or some other party."

Deckweiss ,

afaik, that is the only way to legally have an anonymous whois entry on the clearnet (please correct me if I am wrong)

darkmatternoodlecow ,

You are not wrong, but there is a reason that identification requirements exist for domain registration. In any case, however, at the end of the day a person who registers a domain through Njalla does not have ownership of the domain. This is not an insignificant fact no matter how you spin it. It's not your domain. You're blindly trusting someone whose credentials are to have pirated movies two decades ago with something that might potentially be tremendously valuable, if to no one else but yourself.

Unless you're literally doing something illegal, choosing Njalla over a regular vendor offering WHOIS privacy is to move beyond privacy consciousness into the realm of paranoid recklessness.

Deckweiss ,

I more or less agree with you.

Do you know of an alternative service, which is easy to use, allows a private whois entry, but gives you the ownership of the domain?

Before njalla, I tried domain.com and I couldn't get the domain in 2 days after ordering it, so I cancelled. (they wrote an email saying that they are reviewing my order and will get back to me in 24h, which they didn't).

I just want to pay and get a domain without the hoops and without giving them my personal address and phone number.

lemmyreader OP ,

I think in Europe the domain name providers (or would one rather call them resellers ?) switched to redacting all private domain holder information since a few years. It was actually quite horrible like it was before, so much email spam, a free ticket for spammers to put all those Whois information wide open on the Internet.
Some providers, like Greenhost in NL, provided Whois masking (cloaking ?) for customers paying a bit more.

Deckweiss ,

I also tried Contabo, because I have other stuff there and they wanted a proper whois entry

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