I am still kinda on the fence if I should move to Proton or not. I bought a subscription on a sale, but I basically don't use any paid features, because they all are sort of vendor lock-in, in a sense I cannot realistically stop paying if I use them, I can mostly do just fine without using them, and it doesn't sound like a real complaint except that "regular" price is just horribly expensive for what I get IMO. The main sales point, of course, is that unlike Google the don't (and allegedly can't) read your emails, but when a service this expensive cannot really compete with a free gmail account feature-wise, and you aren't involved in Al-Qaeda or anything, it makes you reconsider.

(And, BTW, if you are involved in Al-Qaeda, i.e. if you are really truly concerned about anyone reading your emails, it's not like you can just rely on Proton and relax. Both because your recipients likely don't use Proton, and also because the more serious you are about such concerns, the more emphasis is on that "allegedly" word. So I'm still not sure what I'm buying.)

I wanted to de-Google, and initially I was using Kolab Now for about two years, and that was terrible, so I was looking for something to replace it, and someone told me about Proton. I have custom domains mapped to it, so if they piss me off enough I could migrate to another service easily enough.

I like having slightly increased security, but I'm not delusional: if I were doing something that I was worried about the government seeing, I probably wouldn't trust any cloud service blindly.

I got in early enough to where they gave me a boatload of storage, a bit more than a terabyte, so that's kind of nice to have as a backup for my photos and the like.

Porkbun is a great registrar. Cheap, decent UI, no bullshit.

Agreed. I'm switching all my domains over from NameSilo this year as they expire. Their shitty UI was one thing, but they jacked up their .com prices a lot, and I'm done with them.

You don't have to wait until expiry. Transfers generally add 1 year of service (for most TLDs), so unless you're already at the limit, you can transfer everything now.

in fact you should not wait till expiration. Some registries refuse transfers if the domain is too close to expiration.

This is the motivation I need to finally switch off NameSilo too

Agreed. They support ALIAS records in their DNS, which many registrars don't.

.com price looks decent too, only 62¢ higher than Cloudflare.

I've settled on Cloudflare + internetbs.net for the cheapest domains with no bs.

I searched for an obscure domain on pork bun. It was open. The very next day it was bought and up for sale for a higher price on some marketplace they own. They’re the same as any other registrar.

> I searched for an obscure domain on pork bun. It was open. The very next day it was bought and up for sale for a higher price on some marketplace they own. They’re the same as any other registrar.

For a counter anecdote: none of the potential domains names I kept tabs on for an organization had that happen, and it was nearly 6 months of regular checking before pulling the trigger.

That's not a counter anecdote. Both things can happen in the same world without invalidating each other.