I recently was gifted a raspberry pi 5 and was looking at domains to buy to host my own instance. What happens to my instance if the domain expires?

Also, do freenom and .tk just not allow new domains to be registered anymore?

  • Nothing aside from losing any traffic if people don’t know the IP address directly to the server. All a domain does is redirect traffic to the website with an easy to remember name.

    • @[email protected]
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      fedilink
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      116 months ago

      The domain is pretty important to Lemmy. If you lose control of it, your instance is effectively dead since the federation will not recognize your traffic until you get the domain back. There’s no way to change the domain of an instance so you’d have to start from scratch.