I recently was gifted a raspberry pi 5 and was looking at domains to buy to host my own instance. What happens to my instance if the domain expires?
Also, do freenom and .tk just not allow new domains to be registered anymore?
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Your instance will still exist, and federation should continue as normal if you manage to reclaim the original domain.
If you have to switch to a new one, however, federation will be very awkward. Other instances will essentially treat you as a brand-new instance, and mirrors of old content will be “orphaned” and no longer sync.
When your domain is close to running out, you should either get an email from your registrar asking you to renew, or a payment notification telling you that your domain will be renewed for whatever price automatically.
If the payment fails, the domain will be temporarily suspended. There is a grace period where nobody can buy that domain, allowing you to settle the missed payment. If you do not settle the payment, the domain will be put back up for sale
None of this affects whatever services you’re running on your Pi, people just won’t be able to connect to it if your domain is suspended.
I’d suggest looking into SSL certificates (Letsencrypt is free) as well as Cloudflare for masking your Pi (your home) IP address from users of your instance - do note this has privacy implications: cloudflare becomes a MITM for your site
Freenom is being sued by Meta (Facebook) at the moment for supposedly not dealing with spam domains. I would not recommend using a Freenom domain if/when they reopen registrations: FMHY had their old Freenom lemmy instance domain seized by Mali’s government
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.ovh domains are like $2/year, if that helps.
I would spend the money on a domain. There’s lots of new TLDs to choose from and some are cheap. A .stream domain is $3.99 at namesilo as is .link.
The .stream domains renew at almost twice the cost of a .com after the first year. Most of the cheap domains renew at a much higher price.
Nothing aside from losing any traffic if people don’t know the IP address directly to the server. All a domain does is redirect traffic to the website with an easy to remember name.
The domain is pretty important to Lemmy. If you lose control of it, your instance is effectively dead since the federation will not recognize your traffic until you get the domain back. There’s no way to change the domain of an instance so you’d have to start from scratch.
