chiisana

Strictly speaking, they’re leveraging free users to increase the number of domains they have under their DNS service. This gives them a larger end-user reach, as it in turn makes ISPs hit their DNS servers more frequently. The increased usage better positions them to lead peering agreement discussions with ISPs. More peering agreements leads to overall cheaper bandwidth for their CDN and faster responses, which they can use as a selling point for their enterprise clients. The benefits are pretty universal, so is actually a good thing for everyone all around… that is unless you’re trying to become a competitor and get your own peering agreement setup, as it’d be quite a bit harder for you to acquire customers at the same scale/pace.

Locks can happen by registrar (I.e.: ninjala, cloudflare, namecheap etc.) or registry (I.e.: gen.xyz, identity digital, verisign, etc.).

Typically, registry locks cannot be resolved through your registrar, and the registrant may need to work with the registry to see about resolving the problem. This could be complicated with Whois privacy as you may not be considered the registrant of the domain.

In all cases, most registries do not take domain suspensions lightly, and generally tend to lock only on legal issues. Check your Whois record’s EPP status codes to get hints as to what may be happening.

Companies need money to pay their employees. Who would’ve thunk they’d change the licensing to allow them to make money. -surprised pikachu face-

Not a space I’m familiar with, but a friend of mine was all over Habitica and mentioned you could self host it. Is this something that might fit what you’re looking for?

Multiple compose file, each in their own directory for a stack of services. Running Lemmy? It goes to ~/compose_home/lemmy, with binds for image resized and database as folders inside that directory. Running website? It goes to ~/compose_home/example.com, with its static files, api, and database binds all as folders inside that. Etc etc. Use gateway reverse proxy (I prefer Traefik but each to their own) and have each stack join the network to expose only what you’d need.

Back up is easy, snapshot the volume bind (stop any service individually as needed); moving server for specific stack is easy, just move the directory over to a new system (update gateway info if required); upgrading is easy, just upgrade individual stack and off to the races.

Pulling all stacks into a single compose for the system as a whole is nuts. You lose all the flexibility and gain… nothing?