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Can you recommend me a free domain service?
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this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2026
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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.
*.dedyn.io registrations are discontinued indefinitely right now unfortunately, following a wave of abusive registrations.
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
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.
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
Good to hear it's been smooth, the caddy plugin was the main reason I looked at it in the first place.