Don't forget about the guy whose twitter account was stolen because a hacker got access to his email _because_ the weak link was a custom domain and poor security at Godaddy. The domain was hacked, giving the attacker full access to email, and therefore ability to change passwords, transfer ownership of a prized twitter account and more. It has been discussed here quite a bit. The folks that answer phones at domain registrars don't usually have adequate training and social engineering is common.

Then don't trust a registrar.

Get a domain directly through a NIC that offers that directly.

Can you recommend one? I've never heard of this.

Many NIC's support this but they aren't really setup to handle individuals (they prefer resellers do that) expect to pay a lot more for the privilege. You can usually find the Registrar by just going to nic.tld (e.g. http://nic.io/)

Your email is always the keys to the kingdom, but I trust Gandi a lot more than I trust Google.

GoDaddy is probably the worst choice someone could make. 2FA is mandatory for email and domains.

Point one here is the BIGGEST. If you do nothing else, own your domain name, and forward mail to a service provider of your choice. In my case, I made my new email address forward to Gmail, and then started changing everything over to use my new address. Then, when I moved providers to FastMail, all I really had to do was re-point my domain name.

Even if for some reason I lost my FastMail (pretty unlikely), I'd just repoint my domain to a new mail service, and I could easily recover all my other accounts. And of course, my email archive is backed up locally, so there's no risk of losing that.

> If you do nothing else, own your domain name, and forward mail to a service provider of your choice.

Even this may not be sufficient. I had a domain name registered through my ISP (UKFSN). At some point I had a disagreement about payment with my ISP, who refused to discuss it. Instead of replying to my messages, they disabled all my domain records and my emails started bouncing. I think this was illegal (and eventually I forced an apology and compensation out of them - long story). Anyway, I would recommend only having a domain name registered through a dedicated registrar who you are not using for any other services.

This is good advice too. I actually have my domain name and web hosting through different companies, particularly for this reason, if I have service issues or something with my web host, I wanna make sure I can switch web hosts or threaten them with the wrath of God or something, without worrying about my domains.

I foresee a slight chicken and egg problem here. Registering a domain requires an email address, so it seems that I would need a third-party email address anyway.

Bootstrap and go from there.

Next cloud looks good, cheers

> ownCloud, soon to change to nextCloud

Why the switch? A quick look at both hasn't resulted in a clear winner in my mind.

The founder and most of the development community has moved to NextCloud. ownCloud is mostly the old corporate people maintaining status quo, from what I understand.