I want to try out some things with a secondary domain. I’d prefer ethical and non-shady providers. I have a fixed IP and a VPS to go with it, so it’s really only about the domain. A subdomain of my current domain is not enough. A subdomain of the provider would be OK but not ideal.
Even paying very little is not an option right now - maybe later.

Doing some preliminary research, the keyword seems to be Dynamic DNS even if I have a static IP. There are providers but those that pop up easily do not instil much confidence.

I want to hear the Fediverse's opinions! I haven't found any recent posts about this.

TIA

Afraid.org, used to use that

https://nic.ua/en/domains/prices ukrainian registrar, gives pp.ua for free for one year, renewable. will ask for cc details. legit

Not sure the use-case but if its temporary:
(Otherwise you have to respond monthly saying you are still using it)

Maybe someone can tell me why they are unethical or you shouldn't use them but I believe you can get a free domain usually from noip

Should be noip.com I believe

Most of those free dns settups use subdomains already. Unless you cant, for a temporary domain name, I recommend just creating an account at a mainstream/reputable dns provider and buying whatever is on sale for a dollar or two per year. Dont plan on renewing because those ones shoot up.

Hopefully the .self tld becomes a thing because it is supposed to be free: https://hccf.onmy.cloud/2026/06/21/reclaiming-our-digital-selves-hccfs-vision-for-a-human-centered-top-level-domain/

but I believe you can get a free domain usually from noip

Up to three, including stuff like mx entries. For the free tier you get a mail every 30 days with a link to confirm that you are still using that name and that's it.

i use them and i am satisfied

I use free.nf for free subdomains and free hosting.

Don’t know how ethical or not ethical they are.

Edit: infinityfree is actually the name, they offer different free subdomains on some set of names they own. free.nf is one of them.

Ya, it does what it says on the tin. My domain there is nearly 17 years old now.

That's good to hear 👍

Thanks, this looks good.

will ask for cc details.

So far I never had any problems making stuff up there.

Thanks. Based in NL is certainly a plus.

nobody said desec.io yet, it's a non profit from berlin and they give free subdomains under dedyn.io, with a proper API, so you can do the DNS challenge for let's encrypt (there's a caddy plugin for it too). I haven't run a domain there myself so can't say how it is long term, but for a "try some things" domain it looks like the least shady of the free ones I guess.

What are you looking to do? If it's to do with a name server, you can delegate a subdomain and it's children to be managed by another server using a ns record. This is actually how DNS works in general.

a dollar or two per year

That exists? I only seen such price for first year only, then it's normal 15$ or higher

It's rare to find a domain that will renew that cheap. The ones that I've seen are usually a sale price or they don't include WHOIS privacy. There are a couple that will renew for around $4 like .top and .de.

http://pagekite.net/

fyi, it's .nf not .nl, and apparently that's for the Norfolk Islands.

If you don't mind using alternative DNS servers, meaning this won't be accessible to the average person, you could try OpenNIC.

Now that's something I would like to learn, how?

Interesting, I did not come across this one before

Interesting free tier option:

Feeling broke?

Instead of paying, you can leave us a friendly message or tell us how you use PageKite, and get free service in return.

And they're from Iceland. And GDPR-compliant. And FOSS.

❤️❤️❤️

I think we have a winner. Let's see how they respond to my explanations.

Are you saying website owners are always located in the country their .tld belongs to?

I'm looking for solutions here, so I did go to the actual site and checked before I wrote the above.

Not sure how to explain how imagination works.

Unless you meant something else?

I do mind not being accessible to the average person.

I'm saying that the TLD .nf is for the Norfolk Islands and not the Netherlands, nothing more.

That probably also means that Norfolk Islands is the legal authority over domains under that TLD regardless where the organization may be.

Anyway, I just wanted to be nice, but alas...

I pay just over $7 USD a year for my .link domain. I originally got it through Spaceship.com but transferred it to cloudflare this year.

I assumed cc details are validated. If all one need to do is to provide imaginative cc details then I need no further explanation

Yea I use desec with the caddy plugin as well and it was super easy to setup! Haven’t really had any issues relating to my domain that I am aware of

*.dedyn.io registrations are discontinued indefinitely right now unfortunately, following a wave of abusive registrations.

Yeah use the "Registry" link on their sidebar and sort by age. The oldest domains on there are not going anywhere.

You can try EU.org possibly.

6-9 digit numeric .xyz domains are 99 cents per year.

They're obviously a bit niche but super cheap!

Yes. Choose those only for temporary projects.

Amazing!

Different take but nip.io and sslip.io just let you use your IP as your domain. When you use the hex notation, it's shorter, more usable and subdomains can just be used at will. Depending your IP address you may even get lucky and get a vanity looking subdomain. Granted it'll be fixed as long as your IP is not changing. When it does, you gotta switch domains. I'm mentioning this because you said your IP is fixed and I have a similar use with these.

"The .tk domain (Tokelau’s country code) was known for letting people register at no cost under certain conditions, often for 1 year at a time. However, free .tk registrations ended after Meta sued Freenom in March 2023 over abuse and lookalike phishing-related activity."

I only remember .tk

And mandatory fuck meta

Wow!!! I had no idea about the free registration thing! I remember a lot of websites in the early 2000s had .tk addresses... also i had a band back then and the guy in charge of the website registered it as .tk and i never knew why....

FUCK ZUCK, FUCK FACEBOOK, FUCK META

Nice. Just registered an account and tried to register a subdomain.eu.org to my VPS' IPv4 address, but I keep getting

SOA from SUBDOMAIN.EU.ORG at nnn.nn.nn.nn: Error: Timeout

Maybe I just have to wait but I'm not sure I'm doing this right at all...

Not my use case, but it's amazing that this exists. No registration necessary.

oh, didn't know that, thanks for the heads up. deSEC still hosts dns for free if you bring your own domain I think, so a cheap one plus deSEC for the acme dns challenge still works, just not the free subdomain part

Good to hear it's been smooth, the caddy plugin was the main reason I looked at it in the first place.

What DNS software are you running?

Client or server?

You need to have an authoritative DNS server listening and answering somewhere. Is this running at your home?

If it is, then try querying the IP directly. The most commonly used tool is "dig", but other ones are available. It should look something like:

dig @your-public-IP subdomain.eu.org

OK, no I don't have that. Did not know that was required to get a .eu.org subdomain.

Yeah, another nice use case is using it at your local dev environment where you can use a single lan IP or even loopback IP and have many domains to differentiate your services mirroring the actual DNS hosted version without messing around the hosts file or local DNS server records. Since their subdomains also resolve to local IPs, you automatically get infinite local address subdomains. As long as you don't mind it'll resolve via remote name server but they won't be able to reach back to your local IPs anyway.

Yeah, they still host for free. I think they've limited the amount of domains you can host per account though, again due to abuse because there were actors that were bringing in thousands of domains I believe. But if you just want to host one domain it's fine.

The API makes the difference (vs DNS services at the registrar), DeSEC is well supported by most tools so you can do DDNS and DNS-01 with it without problems.

good to know about the limit, thanks. for one domain plus DNS-01 that's all most of us need anyway

Yeah I can understand small self-hosters having maybe a handful of domains but some users were coming in with thousands. I mean if you have thousands of domains there's obviously something else going on and maybe you should be paying someone for that.