Domain names seem expensive in comparison. The cheaper VPS that I use for playing around is just $10.29/year.
I thought I’d get a domain name from RackNerd as well, but they’re $24.95/year + I think $4.99 for privacy.
I’ve checked Namecheap, and that seemed great, until I found that renewal prices are often through the roof.
I don’t really care about it being nice. For now, mostly I just want to use the VPS as image host for Lemmy, since Imgur and Catbox are both a bit problematic.
And without a domain name, the images only show as link posts in the default LemmyUI (though it seems to work elsewhere). Plus it makes migration impossible.
That means you can’t host your own dns or have some other commercial provider do dns resolution for you. Typically the registration and dns service are two distinct things.
Cloudflare will control and see your DNS traffic unless you switch the registration to a new company. Right now you would pay $11/yr for registration and $0/yr for DNS service. They could change that $0/yr to something else.
It’s only noteworthy because it deviates from the norm. For some reason they really want to handle your traffic.