Domain names seem expensive in comparison. The cheaper VPS that I use for playing around is just $10.29/year.
I thought I’d get a domain name from RackNerd as well, but they’re $24.95/year + I think $4.99 for privacy.
I’ve checked Namecheap, and that seemed great, until I found that renewal prices are often through the roof.
I don’t really care about it being nice. For now, mostly I just want to use the VPS as image host for Lemmy, since Imgur and Catbox are both a bit problematic.
And without a domain name, the images only show as link posts in the default LemmyUI (though it seems to work elsewhere). Plus it makes migration impossible.
I have entirely too many domains at namesilo.com. Privacy is included for free in the majority of circumstances – not for .org. .com renewals for me are down to $8.85 year because of the aforemented “too many.” I also have some .social and other newer TLDs and those are stupidly expensive.
I use nothing else from namesilo. For domains I use I don’t even use their nameservers. But for what I need, their UI is sometimes awful, but it does what I need.