That was quite a break!
Well that was quite a break, huh? Sorry, life has been busy recently, and now I have a bit more time & probably more truthfully more inclination to continue with posting to my blog.
I've been playing around with porkbun as a new Domain registrar, I've used name cheap for years, but the good folks at omg.lol pointed me towards porkbun.
porkbun.com
It's a typical Domain registrar, people rave about it online, but well in my opinion, it's, you know, OK. I'm not sure what I imagined porkbun to be, but at least I now have 3 domains with them. In my not so humble opinion; It's simply a Domain registrar that does Domain registrar things quite well. I like the fact that it has WHOIS privacy on by default, but then so does Namecheap. I probably saved a couple of dollars on the 3 domain names that I bought, using PorkBun rather than Namecheap, and hey every little helps, right?
dnssec.io
I'm trying a new DNS provider called dnssec.io, based in Germany; it's free. They're all groovy regarding everything DNS. They insist that you set-up your DNSSEC records with your domain provider, before you can enter any other DNS records, so that gets a big thumbs up from me. I'm finding their webpages a little bit confusing though. I guess that most people that know what they're doing, simply use their API. Nope, not me. I thought I had filled out my DNSSEC records on porkbun under the 'Registrar DNSEC' section of my domain name, but I must have forgotten to hit the save button. Not a biggie, I thought I'll just go back to dnssec.io and pick them up from there again. Can I find them, can I chuff! They're really responsive for any emails during work hours, so I'll wait until tomorrow to solve this mystery. They're - understandably - not happy with you not using DNSSEC records, so I've written them an email asking for help. As a total aside, I have noticed that they don't currently accept puny code domain names. A puny code domain name is something like this: 🍕.com, or in my case 🌶️.omg.lol. It's what we call an edge-case in IT though, so not a deal-breaker by any stretch of the imagination.
Most of my DNS records for my domains are currently with cloudflare. I have mixed feelings about them. They're big, but they do provide a good basic free service though. Hard to knock something like that. They've recently come up with a way of blocking the AI bots from crawling your websites/blogs. I'm not sure how effective it is, but it's something that I'll certainly be following as I'm curious to see how good this service is.
chilli.sh domain
The thing that recently kicked me off with trying out both dnssec.io and trying porkbun, was the fact that my domain chilli.ai was up for renewal. Namecheap, and porkbun wanted approx. $180 for 2 years registration, and I thought that was too expensive for what is, in effect, a small blog. So I found chilli.sh was available at a cheaper rate. So this blog will soon be chilli.sh going forward, plus I can renew this domain an annual basis, rather than having to cough up 2 years at a time.
It's so difficult trying to find a one-word domain name, but lots of people want to sell you one though, if you look through the online auctions. I think that people that buy a domain name and want to try to sell it for a ga-zillion dollars, should only be allowed to hold onto a domain for 2 years, before they have to put it 'back in the pot' for everyday common use, if it's not sold in that time.