Locality Domains
I have briggs.seattle.wa.us, and you might be able to get one for yourself, with your own city and state, if you're in the US! They're free, too. I had success following Frederick Chan's great guide, but your mileage may vary, especially depending on what city you want your domain to contain.
Services
- DNS: I went with AWS Lightsail but I regret it. It's free because of a sort of pricing loophole, but it's a bit of a pain to work with. The input validator is very cryptic, and I still haven't found a way to point stuff at a CloudFront distribution or other AWS endpoint. I intend to switch to Route 53 (which Lightsail DNS seems to use, but doesn't let you manage the zone in the Route 53 dashboard) if I ever have the need for a more competent DNS nameserver.
- CloudFlare: Not. I've tried and researched, but CloudFlare seems to insist that I can't use their services, even without their DNS, on what they see as a subdomain. Without an enterprise account, that is. I wonder if it's worth getting
.seattle.wa.uson the Public Suffix List (PSL) so it gets recognized as an effective top-level domain (eTLD). I guess.wa.usis already a recognized eTLD in the PSL. - Email: I use Purelymail and they're awesome. Nothing special about the locality domain for registering with them. I'm remembering some issue I had, possibly with a different email provider, where one of the email authentication DNS records was too long for Lightsail so I had to re-split the string onto different lines? I think the record I was instructed to add was already split at 256 characters, but Lightsail had some arbitrary limit that's just a little less than that, like 240 characters. So I concatenated and re-split the authentication record at 240 or whatever and it worked fine.
Thanks for visiting!