Private Domain Registrars and VPS Providers

Questions
1

Greetings all and PG Team!

I have a couple of questions regarding a few of my recent ventures diving into experimentation with custom domains and exploring some self-hosted applications.

  1. Are there any recommendations regarding good and solid quality domain registrars that would be highly suggested from either Privacy Guides or the community? If not, would Cloudflare be considered “good enough” for privacy as both a domain registrar and authoritative DNS service?

Reasoning: Around a week or so ago, I bought a custom domain off of Njalla originally due to my desire to try it out since it was a commonly recommended platform for buying domains privately/anonymously. Buying the domain on Njalla was successful, however I encountered some issues when the domain got added to a blocklist on Spamhaus after I sent only a few test emails from my Proton email to my personal Gmail account to see if things worked. I then decided to try buying a custom domain off of Cloudflare’s own domain registrar, and everything seems to have worked just fine. I saw that the issues that I ran into don’t seem to be exclusive to me and that others have had similar experiences with domains bought through Njalla. I heard that Porkbun is another suggested registrar commonly recommended on review sites and YouTube channels. In addition, I could not find any recommendations pages on the PG site regarding domain registrar providers.

  1. Does the Privacy Guides team or the community have any good suggestions for cheap, well-priced, and good quality VPS providers for the purpose of testing out self-hosted applications like Nextcloud, Pangolin, PiHole, Netbird, SearXNG, etc. (mainly for testing and learning rather than for production use)?

Reasoning: I am just trying to find VPS providers that are generally well-priced and don’t charge overly expensive pricing if I wanted to use virtual servers with more cores, RAM, storage, bandwidth, etc. I looked into DigitalOcean and Linode so far. Although both platforms seem relatively user-friendly, their pricing tiers seem to be a bit high for what they offer for what is just essentially a virtual machine existing in the cloud. I am not sure if perhaps platforms like AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Azure, or Oracle Cloud will likely work just fine for me or if there are any better suggestions. I also haven’t found any recommendations pages for VPS providers on the PG site either.

These are mostly aimed directly at the Privacy Guides team themselves, but I am open to anyone from the community who has any useful information as well.

Once again, thanks so much to anyone reading this and I hope that you have a good one!

Happy Holidays/Merry Christmas!

-DTLegit

2 Likes
2

IIRC, Porkbun GoDaddy used anti-customer practices (buying domains users where looking at). I didn’t check the info though. As a selfhoster, I would recommend using your own hardware (for multiple reasons, mainly security, you probably can’t do more private, you aren’t dependent on the internet, the latency can be near zero and you can deploy LAN protections), especially if you’re deploying PiHole, and an old entreprise server can be way more cost effective than a VPS (though needs more maintenance). In my experience, creating an Oracle Cloud account was impossible (CC confirmation just didn’t work, even though using Mastercard AND Visa from major french banks and Revolut). There’s PikaPods for deploying selfhosted apps, though IDK about their privacy practices.

EDIT: Checked info

3
2 Likes
4

Got a source for this one? :eyes:

I guess that Njalla, Porkbun and OrangeWebsite are indeed the 3 most common that I found after some research myself. :+1:t2:

And yes, companies might blacklist you if you use some “off the grid” registrar because of some shady people tainting a given registrar.[1]

Yes, buying from a big name will always open you all the doors.
Cloudflare is about Security but not Privacy. And it is probably one of the most well-known one, I wouldn’t be too surprised if it might be known even by non-techies[2] at this point given the few downtime issues with had because of them (bringing Signal down etc…).

As a whole, the lower you go from an infrastructure POV, the cheaper it is.
Hence, Heroku $$$$ > DigitalOcean $$$ > AWS $$ > own the hardware $.
But it will be less friendly to use, with a disgusting UX and a “figure it out yourself bro” kind of mindset.
You get what you pay for (convenience VS well-priced). :+1:t2:
Getting into hosting stuff on the Cloud (like GCP, Azure, AWS) is its own skillset entirely with certifications etc. Wouldn’t recommend this one unless you want to have a career in that specific field.

Also, you could probably host all of this on a RaspberryPi at home, cheaper, more in control and you don’t really get a lot of benefits from having it hosted on a VPS directly.
Okay, maybe buy a x86 with an Intel N100 if you want a closer architecture to the one used by VPS providers but in the end…it’s still just Linux so 99% of it will be transferable from local machine to some random VPS. :sign_of_the_horns:t2::grinning_face:

Overall, DigitalOcean is a solid run for your buck.
And yes, it will always be over-priced for what it is because you’re renting out from someone and they need to have margins. :winking_face_with_tongue:

DHH talks about this quite well. Their scale is not yours but again, buying real hardware and leaving it in your closet will always be cheaper/more powerful. :100:

PG has a cluster spread over 3 locations apparently. Not sure what are the VPS tho.

  1. pure supposition here but I assume that given the business model of Njalla, they might have had more illegal stuff there rather than Cloudflare, hence why people are more cautious with their range of IPs? ↩︎

  2. just like AWS ↩︎

2 Likes
5

My bad, I just looked it up, I apparently messed up Porkbun and Godaddy (which is an obvious scam[1][2][3]).

  1. Reddit - The heart of the internet ↩︎

  2. Reddit - The heart of the internet ↩︎

  3. Reddit - The heart of the internet ↩︎

6

Ooooh okay. I was a bit surprised to hear such practices from Porkbun.
Thanks for the fix! :folded_hands:t2:

7

Alright, awesome! Thank you so much!

1 Like
8

Fwiw, I ran a VPS instance for a few months on is*hosting and didn’t have any problems. They accept crypto payments (XMR included). No idea what their overall reputation is, but they were one of the recommended providers in the AmneziaVPN/AmneziaWG docs. A bit pricier than an equivalent DigitalOcean droplet, if memory serves, so I’m not sure if it would be considered cheap. Just throwing the name out in case you want to do your own checking.

9

For domain registrars and DNS hosting, I’d highly recommend easyDNS. They have very affordable plans which offer generous extras, like email accounts, etc.

I don’t know how they rank as far as security and privacy, but Hostinger has been a reliable VPS host.

10

Are there any recommendations regarding good and solid quality domain registrars that would be highly suggested from either Privacy Guides or the community? If not, would Cloudflare be considered “good enough” for privacy as both a domain registrar and authoritative DNS service?

As others mentioned Cloudflare is a security and a not privacy company.

Regarding DNS. If you don’t tunnel your traffic through Cloudflare (e.g. use the DDoS-Protection) and just use the ns, Cloudflare has an excellent uptime.
Their NS servers are stable and strong enough, what caused issues was the DDoS-Protection.

Does the Privacy Guides team or the community have any good suggestions for cheap, well-priced, and good quality VPS providers for the purpose of testing out self-hosted applications like Nextcloud, Pangolin, PiHole, Netbird, SearXNG, etc. (mainly for testing and learning rather than for production use)?

I would go with Hetzner.
They have pretty solid hardware to a solid price with good support. For example, I contacted the support one hour past midnight and got an answer after only 5 minutes. Same timezone.

I just would advise against any bullet proofed hosters. They will go down eventually.

1 Like
11

Regarding domain rregistrars (often overlooked)

You might want to look at smaller EU-based registrars that focus on:

  • Clear abuse handling

  • Separation of registrar and DNS

  • Transparent policies (including pricing)

Two examples worth considering are:

  • Trustname

They operate out of Estonia (European Union), focus on domain privacy (which is two-tier) and separation of concerns (registrar ≠ hosting ≠ DNS by default), and aren’t as “tainted” reputation-wise as some offshore anonymity registrars. That middle-ground positioning can reduce the risk of automatic blocklisting while still avoiding big-tech centralization.

  • NiceNIC and Matbao (both from Asia)

Great options popular among “professionals”

12

How are we supposed to trust Trustname when the only reason we’re even hearing about them is because you keep pushing them in every thread?

3 Likes