Fuck you, domain name registrars.

As of October 2024, registering a domain name with the .flowers top-level domain costs around €130 per year. That would be more than double of what I currently pay for the entire hosting, for just the domain name. From their 2023–24 annual report, ICANN, the main organization in control of DNS registration, had a revenue of $184.8 million.

1. Limitations

• Let's Encrypt doesn't issue certificates for bare IP addresses, other Certificate Authorities require you to actually own the IP address, and self-signed certificates are considered insecure (for whatever reason). All of this essentially means my website cannot be served over HTTPS.
• Modern browsers block HTTP content from being loaded into a page that's loaded via HTTPS, also known as “mixed content”. Because my website cannot be served over HTTPS, images and other content hosted on my website cannot be embedded on other HTTPS websites. This also means I cannot, for example, host a WebSocket game server for a game hosted on itch.io if I wanted to.
• Big email providers generally require you to authenticate with SPF or DKIM to reach them, and that necessitates having a domain name, which means emails originating from my server either get flagged as spam or never see the light of an inbox.
• Even though bare IP addresses are as old as the internet, many modern, widely used systems don't consider them as valid hostnames. Examples: Postfix, Mastodon.
• I cannot join the XXIIVV webring cool kids club because they require a domain name (for some bizarre reason).

Apart from the reasons listed above, I see no point in having a domain name, especially considering this site is mainly for personal use. Perhaps one day, when one of these starts bothering me enough, I will finally succumb to the curse. For now, I am at the whims of my hosting provider — if one day they decide to ban me for a bullshit reason, I lose access to this IP address forever.