Hi there, I’m currently looking into renting a domain from cloudflare for convenient access to my hosted services from outside my home. It seems some of the cheapest options for the domain name I want to use are country TLDs (.uk, .us). Does this bind me to their laws in any way? can anyone come at me for hosting (e.g. Illegally downloaded content) on their TLD?
Regardless, is there any reason I shouldn’t use cloudflare for this? any drawbacks I should be aware of?
Edit: I should mention I’m currently using duckdns for free and the reason I want to move is that it seems some organizations (like my university and workplace) block duckdns (for reasons beyond me).
Edit 2: So to my understanding there’s not a big one, but some risk involved, so I think I’ll pay a bit more for a non-ccTLD. Thanks everyone!
The short answer is no, you aren’t bound to the nation’s laws unless you have a “presence” in their jurisdiction - it could be argued that by using CloudFlare you might be subject to US law because the traffic runs through systems owned by a US company, or you are giving money to a US company by using them as a registrar. The worst they could probably do is order CloudFlare to turnover records or stop doing business with you, but still. Typically that would require lawyers and be expensive, so unless you’ve really pissed off someone with a ton of cash you are probably safe.
The actual domain itself doesn’t really bind you beyond the registration rules, which the country themselves set - typically these will allow for cancellation of the registration for any reason.
Watch out: Country specific TLDs may be aubject to restrictions like .eu or .de requiring to live there. Some may even require an adress there.
.de doesn’t require residency but requires a local contact.
Many European registrars work around these restrictions by providing their own local proxy for your benefit (for a cost). Some examples (that also include a list of such ccTLD’s):
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| CF | CloudFlare |
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| IP | Internet Protocol |
| VPN | Virtual Private Network |
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You can use noip.com for free dynamic DNS
And if you’re concerned about whoever finding out you’re hosting illegal content you can have a WireGuard server and have everything go through it instead of being open to the web. This also has the advantage of being essentially undetectable from the outside
I used to connect through wireguard but I want to be able to use it from devices that aren’t necessarily my own, both for sharing with friends and for personal access from friends and family devices (e.g. my parents’ android tv).
Edit: Also I just tried to go on noip.com from my workplace and it seems they blocked it as well… so that’s no good.
You aren’t beholden to any other countries laws, but such domains are the property of their respective countries and their usaging can be conditional and revoked at any time (see what happened recently with .ml domains). Personally I use a .xyz domain because it’s also very cheap, although I’ve heard that it can make you appear more “suspicious” to antivirus companies and such.
Google literally (for whatever reason) flagged my domain or subdomain as malicious.
On the subdomain I noticed it, I am running regular Jellyfin and that is hidden behind a 2FA middleware.
I reported it and it got removed but that was interesting.
