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?

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

Create a post

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we’re here to support and learn from one another. Insults won’t be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it’s not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don’t duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

  • 1 user online
  • 279 users / day
  • 589 users / week
  • 1.34K users / month
  • 4.55K users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 3.49K Posts
  • 69.8K Comments
  • Modlog