Is it easy/cheap to get a stable IP address? I would worry that if I just get any cheap VPS host, they might switch the IP address at any point, but I'm not sure how true that actually is.
Easy yes. Even VPS providers need to maintain the IP, since your DNS typically points to that IP. You can also typically move the IP to another machine from the same provider.
But as a resut, VPS often have a different price for public IPs compared to private IPs. For instance, it costs €0.004/h per IP at Scaleway.
The commercial domain name system is a perfect example of the type of artificial scarcity capitalism creates and exploits.
Domain names are tiny little rows in a database. They cost next-to-nothing to set up and maintain. There’s absolutely no reason why they couldn’t be a public good, paid for from the public purse.
And yet you pay (at times extortionate) amounts for them… why?
Because capitalism.
Isn't this a bit simplistic? Domain names are a limited resource, so there has to be some way to regulate who can use which domains. What alternative method of regulation would you propose and why it's better?
Tbh it would be really cool for there to be a TLD dedicated to extremely cheap names, on the order of 0.1-10c. This could enable all kinds of fun use cases, including automated ones.
Lets say the domain is .anything, and your domain had to be at minimum 10 characters to limit the use of squatted names”. Then you could build a website for one purpose like “lets-go-get-pizza-tomorrow.anything” or whatever. Perhaps there could be a mandatory expiry or something.
IPv4 addresses are scarce. IPv6 addresses are not easy to remember, and not supported everywhere.
Has the author never heard of shared hosting providers? This already exists. Those tend to be extremely cheap, often cheaper than a VPS, and do not require remembering IPs. You share one IP with many people, and the domain name and the Host header lets the server tell the sites apart. A .com is under $10/month. There are/were also free domains.
> Domain names are tiny little rows in a database. They cost next-to-nothing to set up and maintain. There’s absolutely no reason why they couldn’t be a public good, paid for from the public purse.
I don’t mind paying for the domain name so much but I do mind the fact that even after paying for the domain name, there is no guarantee of having full control over the domain name. I do mind that even after spending money year after year, we are only renting a domain name, with the possibility of the domain name being taken away from us anytime!
I used to be a big proponent of hosting your email address at your own domain name. But then I had a very unpleasant experience of losing my domain name several years ago, for no fault of mine, due to anti-malware operations completely unrelated to my website. After that incident, I am not so sure!
I would honestly love to see government involvement in assigning public usage domain names. Phone numbers are much more limited than the domain space, but those too are really in the domain of "public good". So much infrastructure depends on reliable and stable phone numbers and email addresses.
There's a kind of "freedom is slavery" or "free as in beer vs free as in speech" mechanic involved with self-hosting. At the end of the day people really appreciate Facebook being free of charge and seem to feel really resentful that they might spend $5-$10 a year to maintain a domain.
I wholeheartedly agree. Bluesky had an interesting idea for identification using a domain you control to verify your account by adding a TXT DNS record for _atproto.
The problem is that it’s only a rented domain and thus a rented username. My DNS provider Porkbun offered a 5 year deal, but I would pay for much longer if I could.
The article is conveniently ignoring that getting your own IP block ranges from practically impossible (ipv4) to very involved (ipv6). And then you also need to figure out way to route traffic for that IP block; not all ISPs and hosting providers are willing to offer BGP sessions and whatnot. In any case it will be orders of magnitude more expensive than basic domain name and DNS hosting.
In the spirit of domains as a public good, mentioned in the article, couldn’t some organization procure a block of IPv6 IPs to distribute them and handle those hoops for everyone?
I like the idea of popularizing using IP addresses for personal sites. I don't like trying to rebrand them Web Numbers, since imo it accomplishes nothing but being potentially confusing.
The bigger issue is hosting these small web sites for people who are used to using platforms which make connecting with other users much more seamless.
Most people want to allow comments and replies at least sometimes and that becomes a bigger headache when you host yourself.
I'd love to see Yarn become a solution for one step setup for people. I'd be even more excited if it's done in a way which is modular enough to allow "power users" to customize the framework, and potentially even bring their own framework and integrate it with features provided by Yarn. For example, maybe I want my framework to do the markdown->HTML and templating, but I want to use the comment system from Yarn.
>ZTDNS enforces strict controls by default, blocking all network connections unless the IP address is resolved through a Protective DNS. As a result, computers are unable to connect to destinations using IP addresses directly.
Now the zthelper Service has been implanted inside Win 11 from a recent package, it's dormant but if you want to try it out there are some recommendations, closely accompanied by troubleshooting approaches:
Looks like trouble is very much to be expected, and it could take a while for enterprise to accommodate it. But once that point is reached I imagine a remote trigger would be pulled and the blast radius would increase dramatically to include all Windows, sometime after Windows 10 is no longer with us. Mowing down small-webs as collateral damage.
Is it explained somewhere how links are supposed to work, especially if the intended use case is that you would just be using your own "address book"? I guess the address book is just a bookmark (and not like a /etc/hosts-type thing?), such that people aren't sharing links that don't work with each other. But the alternative is that they're sharing IP links, which, unless I am misunderstanding, means you probably do have to memorize IP addresses, and... all of them? Otherwise every link you post to your latest blog post or whatever just looks like a bunch of inscrutable (scary) numbers to people?
Not just scary because they are long numbers, but scary because they will take the user to some unknown place. If someone’s blog links to a domain I recognize, I feel safe clicking it. If a blog is linking to a random IP address, it then becomes a question of how much I trust the person behind the poster, and their ability to secure their server… and the security of my own browser.
It could work similar to @mention in social networks; you'd just need your user agent to display links to known numbers with the label from your address book. Which only works if you know that number already, but as the blog post mentions, that's also the case for telephone numbers and it doesn't bother anyone there. We're just used to never seeing IP addresses anymore.
Paying $2-$10/year for a non-premium name (which will be drastically easier for your readers to use than any IP address) seems strictly better than arranging for a VPS static IP and chaining the identity of your site onto that VPS provider forever. I'm not sure this is what IP address certificates are really meant for.
In my opinion, it's much more complicated to register an IP with RIPE than registering any domain. Becoming a RIPE NCC member is hard.
Sure, you can work around it and route subnets or IPs from an existing IP or use NAT. But if I understand it correctly (please correct me if I'm wrong), you need a VPN or another way to tunnel it through the public network.
So you are in the same situation as with domains when you use an existing IP that someone else has registered.
My personal site's IP address has changed a ton over the last 5 years, but the domain name has been able to stay the same. So anyone who knows my site can always find it at the same place. That seems like a valuable service which I would like to keep.
Maybe what the author really wants is a cheap or free TLD that gives out uuids instead of human readable domain names? Or as they sort of touch on it could be subdomain based? I think having a layer between address and IP helps a lot vs using "raw" ip addresses...
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 61.2 ms ] threadBut as a resut, VPS often have a different price for public IPs compared to private IPs. For instance, it costs €0.004/h per IP at Scaleway.
Lets say the domain is .anything, and your domain had to be at minimum 10 characters to limit the use of squatted names”. Then you could build a website for one purpose like “lets-go-get-pizza-tomorrow.anything” or whatever. Perhaps there could be a mandatory expiry or something.
Has the author never heard of shared hosting providers? This already exists. Those tend to be extremely cheap, often cheaper than a VPS, and do not require remembering IPs. You share one IP with many people, and the domain name and the Host header lets the server tell the sites apart. A .com is under $10/month. There are/were also free domains.
> 8,000,000,000 humans
Alright everyone choose your opponent.
I don’t mind paying for the domain name so much but I do mind the fact that even after paying for the domain name, there is no guarantee of having full control over the domain name. I do mind that even after spending money year after year, we are only renting a domain name, with the possibility of the domain name being taken away from us anytime!
I used to be a big proponent of hosting your email address at your own domain name. But then I had a very unpleasant experience of losing my domain name several years ago, for no fault of mine, due to anti-malware operations completely unrelated to my website. After that incident, I am not so sure!
I have written more about that incident here:
https://susam.net/sinkholed.html
I wish the mainstream World Wide Web were built around the concept of owning a domain name where we could prove our ownership using a private key.
What happens if you lose that private key?
The problem is that it’s only a rented domain and thus a rented username. My DNS provider Porkbun offered a 5 year deal, but I would pay for much longer if I could.
If you own a domain, when your IP address changes it's generally a short migration.
The bigger issue is hosting these small web sites for people who are used to using platforms which make connecting with other users much more seamless.
Most people want to allow comments and replies at least sometimes and that becomes a bigger headache when you host yourself.
I'd love to see Yarn become a solution for one step setup for people. I'd be even more excited if it's done in a way which is modular enough to allow "power users" to customize the framework, and potentially even bring their own framework and integrate it with features provided by Yarn. For example, maybe I want my framework to do the markdown->HTML and templating, but I want to use the comment system from Yarn.
I like that too, but I would have to figure there is a big-web where they just don't care what you & I like to begin with :\
"Zero trust" DNS is steadily closing in on Windows, and that can be a pretty significant portion of web users.
https://4sysops.com/archives/windows-11-zero-trust-dns-ztdns...
>ZTDNS enforces strict controls by default, blocking all network connections unless the IP address is resolved through a Protective DNS. As a result, computers are unable to connect to destinations using IP addresses directly.
Last year it was guinea-pigged:
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/networkingblog/anno...
Now the zthelper Service has been implanted inside Win 11 from a recent package, it's dormant but if you want to try it out there are some recommendations, closely accompanied by troubleshooting approaches:
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/networkingblog/anno...
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/networkingblog/trou...
Looks like trouble is very much to be expected, and it could take a while for enterprise to accommodate it. But once that point is reached I imagine a remote trigger would be pulled and the blast radius would increase dramatically to include all Windows, sometime after Windows 10 is no longer with us. Mowing down small-webs as collateral damage.
Then there's IPv4 exhaustion with that in hand:
I could see phishing being a problem for any notable website.
But having certs for IPs does seem like a nice option without paying for a domain.
Same with the https://small-tech.org link in the footer, why is that not an IP address link?
Sure, you can work around it and route subnets or IPs from an existing IP or use NAT. But if I understand it correctly (please correct me if I'm wrong), you need a VPN or another way to tunnel it through the public network.
So you are in the same situation as with domains when you use an existing IP that someone else has registered.
What about the infrastructure to maintain it? What about the dns traffic volume?
This feels very reductionist and probably more expensive then led to believe
[1] https://media.ccc.de/v/2025-170-how-to-become-your-own-isp
Maybe what the author really wants is a cheap or free TLD that gives out uuids instead of human readable domain names? Or as they sort of touch on it could be subdomain based? I think having a layer between address and IP helps a lot vs using "raw" ip addresses...