Decision time
Decision time
Decision time
You... you shut up. 🥲
Use your domain for your primary email address, have some regrets about it, but never be able to walk away..
That's what I do. Anytime I need to sign up for something with an email I do:
I use wildcards for some stuff, but I mostly just use public@domain.com and have my real email for friends and family private. It's not liked I get emails from friends and family anymore anyway. Everything is iMessage or SMS.
Same. Crazy obvious which companies are getting hacked or selling my info.
I do the same thing, but with gmail tags.
Now if I get a spam email to that address I'll know exactly what to block.
Soooo. I’m dumb. I host my overseerr on my domain that just routes to my local IP for my local desktop. How do I get email on this domain without spending dumb money on an email hosting server?
PurelyMail is a great and cheap service. It's like $10 per year. You just set up some records (MX and TXT) on your domain provider and that's it.
You could also self-host email, but then you need a server that's always powered on and it adds much complexity, so I suggest to use a managed service instead.
The good thing about using your own domain is that you're not tied to any service. You could migrate to any other provider (such as ProtonMail, FastMail, etc.) without ever changing your email address on all services.
Linux + postfix (SMTP) + dovecot (IMAP and POP3) + SPF + DKIM on the host
Point the MX record for your domain to your IP address
Contact your ISP and ask them to set the PTR record for your IP to your hostname
Mail can be handled by a very low end computer, a raspberry pi can handle email for a small number of users
If you have a specific mail machine you would forward the ports you use to that host on your router.
On the flip side my husband has held on to the domain he got for 22 YEARS., and never did anything with it. We finally got our emails up and running with it last week. Don’t let your dreams be dreams!
Out of curiosity; who is providing the mail service? Or are you self-hosting? Trying to organise mine, hoping I can get it done maybe 19 years quicker.
I use Hover. They’re based in Canada and I’ve been using them for years for my business domain and email. Was an easy choice for personal too. Every time I’ve had to call the tech support they have fixed the problem super fast, did extra stuff, and were super lovely. $20 a year for a small mailbox each, which is more than enough for us.
I self host email. Email is easy. I went a tad overboard with database configuration, a configuration/password change program, a few virtual hosts so I can renew six different names, but a single domain on a Linux box (any flavour) is easy
It makes it easy to make a bespoke email address for every entity you interact with, or show them the respect they deserve by giving your valid email spam@your.domain.tld
It is a bit of a hobby though. You need to keep up with email security if you want to send to anyone.
I just set my domain email up with Zoho. Was easy enough and they have a free option. Although I pay $1.25/mo per user for two users, just to get a little extra storage space and be able to use SMTP and ActiveSync to send email from my servers for notifications and use a different mobile app than their default one.
You know what's worse? Starting a successful one that makes a whole ass salary and then having google updates smack it the f out.
What happened?
I'm gonna guess search engine down ranking.
whole-ass milk
Whole ass-milk
Nice work man. Fuck the internet and its dark ass wizards.
lol I’ve been squatting a couple of domains since 2001, my day will come!!!
Start selfhosting. I use my domain for tons of stuff
I have an HP mini PC behind the router, noip.com, no money spent
Same with the HP mini PC. But I have a $12/yr dotcom domain and a script on my server updates the DNS record anytime the IP changes.
I used noip.com for like 30 or 60 days. Then I got really annoyed at having to renew the DDNS every 30 days. After switching to duckdns.org I haven't had any problems whatsoever. It's completely free and you don't have to renew anything manually. You obliviously still need to have a script running to update the DDNS though, otherwise it wouldn't be very dynamic would it.
no money spent
Well... electricity.
How much are you selling for?
Selling? I host things for myself, not others. Except my Lemmy instance I suppose, that's public.
This is the way. I would be lost without a domain. Even mail is selfhosted with my domain. But I only use subdomains, the real domain is abandoned.
See email is one of the few things I don't host. I host a webmail frontend, and use my domain. But PurelyMail is an amazing service that's so cheap it's basically free at personal scale with very few limits. I didn't really care to try and deal with having all my mail sent to spam.
More like "Dammit, my domain auto-remewed again. Oh well, it's only $12. I'll cancel next year." (It's been 5 years.)
Nooo, one day I'll have the time to build my writing utensil repair business.
And then I'll need the domain penisbroken.com
Don't worry, the dream lives on!
VancesCouchSloppySeconds.com is still available!!!
I'd be tempted to buy that. When you visit it's just a white page with a leather couch in the middle of the screen, everytime you click the couch it would moan seductively and every fifth click would give a squelch sound.
Oh this one cuts.
Wanted to start a blog about my weight loss journey. Lost the weight and never started the blog. Still paying for the domain 7 years later.
Only thing left to do is gain the weight back so I can try again!
Do a retro! Lol
$12? I pay $20 for mine.
$20? I pay $30 for mine.
Wait you guys pay?
This is why I never bought a domain. Can't give up on your dreams if you never pursued them in the first place!
Mine is on automatic renewal.
To a debit card on an account I closed months ago
Check. Mate.
let the ghosts fight it out
Fate will take it from here lol
CatBagz.com is in this photograph and I don't like it.
What, no one really wants to purchase cat faced bags from a guy on the internet that doesn't like cats all that much and doesn't use bags all that much and can't social media and mostly just wants to stop being a fucking company shill but no I'm so fucking good at it that's my job and my life forever.
Fuck you, dreams. I'm taking cat bags to my fucking grave.
At least my red bubble stickers sell.
Oh this one's topical. I forgot I made it.
bought my domain in July... still havent finished my website...
Give it a couple years… and then a few more.
Why are you stressing this nice Lemming to fast track their site? It'll take the standard 30 years. It's fine.
Wait you guys made websites?
What's stopping you from succeeding?
Funny enough I started getting more commission work through Twitter and have been focusing on that recently. The website I'm making was gonna be to serve as an art portfolio and advertise my commission services lmao
Neither. If I'm not using the domain, I can pretend I still have it.
That's not neither, it's one of the options.
Which one?
And then it becomes a pornsite.
This whole thread is a gem. So many amazing websites. It's inspired me to make a website and hopefully be a repo for all your websites like the old internet
Is this the sticker of a hobby that you want to be part of?
MY FUCKING WEBSITE DOESN'T EVEN HAVE CAT BAGS FOR SALE WHAT WAS I THINKING?
The domain was always for me to archive the things I enjoyed.
I let one of mine expire a few years ago. Finally decided I wanted to try to register it again, but a squatter is now sitting on it asking for something like $10k $3.6k.
Edit: just double-checked, they lowered the price to only $3595!
And that's why I'll never give up my domain. Those vultures will immediately snap it.
I still have a number of domains that I registered aspirationally for projects I never really started.
Easy decision, I pay every time.
You can pry cuteredpanda.com from my cold dead hands.
Y u no website! Lol
When I click that, I only see the right side from the eye outward, of what I assume is a cute red panda. On mobile
Ah, yeah - someday I'll make it scale better
Awww cute
But if I don't renew what will become of sneakymonkeybutt.net
my domain is my media server, so id rather not end my domain.
20 domains and counting (just got another one yesterday lmao)
Addict.
Now think, patents are similar things but for with more money. And imagine if someone else had similar idea and made slightly similar website you go sue them coz you had the idea first.
ok genuine question from someone who wants to make a website but has no experience in it other than a HTML class and doesn't want to resort to a cushy GUI based website maker, How do I make a website? I'm not talking about the HTML, I got that part down. I'm talking about how do I actually get a domain and host? I tried doing it and got like a $5 domain, but the host was like $30 for a year which was too much for me and couldn't figure out how to selfhost with my extremely limited knowledge. Is that just what it costs to have a website or is there an easier way?
For hosting check out something like github pages. There several other free ones as well, but pages looks like the easiest to set up. If you want something more robust, you could look into Netlify or Vercel, but that's gonna require a little more know-how.
Self host isn't that bad. Say you have a raspberry pi. Install linux on the pi (basically the only thing to do with it), then google how to set up a LAMP server (Linux, Apache, Mysql, Php/python). Once you've followed all the steps they list then now you have a web server. To get it out on the internet log into your router and port forward for HTTP and now anyone can see that glorious Apache default web page.
Then for a domain just find the first domain register and buy the domain from them. Once you own a domain point it towards your IP address (just google what is my IP) and you're set.
Your web page is now on the internet and anyone can type a nice name to get to your page. Anyone can also use any exploits then find so you have to make sure you're keeping up updating your devices. And every port you forward is an intrusion point into your network should someone want to hack you.
Anyone can also use any exploits then find so you have to make sure you’re keeping up updating your devices. And every port you forward is an intrusion point into your network should someone want to hack you.
This is the part that scares the shit out of me. I bought a domain with the intention of making a little web 1.0 website for fun and to learn, but I have no real idea what I'm doing and the security risk makes it a non-starter :(
It depends on how fancy of a website you are trying to make. But check out something like Hugo or Jekyll. I haven’t used Jekyll personally but have used Hugo. There are plenty of templates to get you started depending the type of content you are planning on putting up.
And the best part is you can host the site for free on GitHub or Gitlab, so the domain name is the only cost.
First off, it's important to understand Responsive Design
As far as a website: you'll need a domain name, you can get some for free, but they usually have short renewals otherwise this is unavoidable.
You can pay for "shared hosting" at any of the major vendors like blue host or GoDaddy and get apache or aspx file hosting for like you said $X0/year.
You can use an s3 static website for ~free. Creating a DNS hosted zone is $.50. but you can create an s3 bucket (think flash drive in the cloud) store a threshold of free documents, and publish them as a website all within the free tier of AWS. This has some technical background and AWS can get expensive of you make mistakes (although this shouldn't scale much unless you upload a thousands ton of files repeatedly)
Alternatively you can use GitHub pages . Git is a tool used by developers to share and edit code, they let you publish free HTML as well, but requires learning git or figuring out a tool with a UI like source tree. I don't think you can use custom domains with this though.
Although if you have any interest in tech, you can also create a free nginx docker container through a lot of services like ecs, but you can also self host in a "sandbox". Docker creates a mini virtual machine with all of the code required to run self contained. Nginx let's you create HTML docker containers by mounting a directory. ~
docker start nginx /website/directory
And it just runs self contained.
You could give a flat file CMS like Grav a shot. It's basically like a wiki system for running a site. There's also a slow burn up a hill of complexity where you do LAMP with PHP then you gravitate to things like express.js then Electron and then you roll poorly on your sanity check and end up naked in a bell tower.
Insert that bell curve meme where it's wordpress on both sides.
For self hosting, pick up docker and understand that then go for portainer - it makes making mistakes in the arena super easy to scrub away. I suggest Synology NAS.
I'm in this picture and I don't like it.
I was tempted to get a domain tie it to a docker image on azure then host a private (just me) Lemmy /(m)/kbin with a few other fediverse (like friendica) on it but I'm just too broke at the moment
I don't recommend hosting a Lemmy just for yourself. How federation currently works is it mirrors EVERYTHING. Your disk will be filled up with images you never even view and you put yourself at risk of having illegal imagery on your machine if you don't actively keep up with which instances you must ban.
Just buy it for ten years. You're ultimately saving money and it'll give you more time to incubate your dream!
I gave up on factamatic.org, my note taking app many many years ago, basically what obsidian is now. I suffer from a lack of execution.
Truer words never spoken
Pay $12, can't let some other jerk have my dream.
github allows a free website through their domain
On one hand I have my personal firstname-lastname-dot-com I'm still hosting for years. I'm not a webdev but WordPress is awfully bloated and everything else needs a touch of webdev skills.
So it's been at "coming soon I'm working on it welcome to sample example theme page" for years, but hey it's indexing well based on age alone!
The other is a fun clever one I route through cloudflare to access all my home server stuff via HTTPS over TailScale. Never have to expose any ports to the big scary world wide web. :p
i did recently go through and turn off auto renewal on a few. I still have several projects i never launched though that I'm holding out hope for... someday
I should take some time and find another redirect for http://notreddit.com
automatic renewal but now I'm questioning it...
I'm definitely getting my blog going regularly again... next year...