I’ve been long term client of GoDaddy when it comes to domains. I think qkaasu.com has been in GoDaddy for 10 years or something. Not anymore.
When Godaddy purchased Webfaction the change was huge. Pricing with Webfaction was clear: Everything was included except special stuff and capacity. When GoDaddy came along, pricing started to be very cumbersome, hard to understand and at the end: pricey.
GoDaddy goes with same plan in Domains. They’re advertising super cheap domains and most of the services are very cheap when you buy them. But, as we know, domain stuff is usually recurring. So, after 3 years or so, cost is much higher and in most cases automatically billed.
In most concrete terms, my qkaasu.com domain with WHOIS privacy was just renewed. Cost for 3 years was whopping 120 USD.
I’ve been saying it many times but I say it once more. I use Opalstack, maybe the best shared hosting provider, to run this and many other sites. Opalstack took what Webfaction had and made it even better. And for my use case it’s perfect.
Even though I love Opalstack, I don’t want to keep my all eggs in the same basket so therefore domains have been in GoDaddy and my DNS is done via Cloudflare (which I really love, btw).
When I got notification that I was invoiced 120 USD for the domain and the privacy product, I got a bit angry and upset because I felt just as it was: I was played.
I somehow remembered that I saw domain registrar stuff in Cloudflare control panel back in the day so in five seconds I was looking at the domain costs in Cloudflare. Cloudflare says that they’re not making any profit from domains. And domain was cheap enough (10 USD / Year). And, of course, privacy product was included in domain price.
If I had moved my domain to Cloudflare earlier, i would’ve saved 90 USD.
Cheap website fast?
I say what you’ll need:
Opalstack for webhosting that scales well and doesn’t need more money every time you use it.
Cloudflare for DNS services and domains. You get DNS for free and domains are cheap. And with quite small prices, you get pretty great services!
And, if you need to send emails, take Mailjet for sending emails. It has free tier and it’s perfect for you.
Do you agree or do you have your own favorite services? Leave a comment. It’s trendy again in 2023!