At the end of Going European I wrote that the domain was the last one left. dotmavriq.life was registered at Name.com, which is American, and it was due to renew on October 24th.
I got around to it on the evening of the 23rd. Not my finest planning, but it worked out.
Picking a registrar
What I wanted was simple: a European company that sells .life domains, gives me decent DNS hosting with an API, and costs less than the $59.99 a year Name.com was charging me.
That last part is where you have to be careful. A lot of registrars sell a domain for a couple of euros the first year and then quietly charge double the normal price every year after. Gandi is a good example: $2.99 to register a .life, $95.98 a year to renew it. So I only compared renewal prices, since that's what you actually pay for as long as you keep the domain.
The short version of the comparison:
OVHcloud (France): €34.09 a year, before VAT.
Hostinger (Lithuania): about $42.
Openprovider (Netherlands): about $47.
Netim (France): about $52.
INWX (Germany) and EuroDNS (Luxembourg): about $61, so no cheaper than Name.com.
Gandi (France): about $96.
OVHcloud won. It's the biggest European cloud provider, it's been around since 1999, and its control panel looks like it was designed by an engineer in a hurry. I don't mind, because I barely have to use it. Everything I needed has an API.
With Portuguese VAT the transfer came to €41.19, and that includes a year of registration. Renewals after that are about €42. Not a huge saving, but it's a saving, and the money goes to a French company.
DNS first, domain second
The domain itself is the easy part. The part that can actually break things is the DNS. My zone had 24 records: the website, the fediverse server, Matrix and its SRV record, Teal, a couple of side projects, the records for sending email from my apps, and all the mail records for Proton Mail.
So I didn't start with the transfer. I started by moving the DNS:
Exported every record from Name.com through their API and kept a copy.
Created a free DNS zone at OVHcloud for dotmavriq.life.
Imported all 24 records into it.
Asked both Name.com's and OVHcloud's nameservers for every record and compared the answers. All of them matched.
Only then pointed the domain at OVHcloud's nameservers.
Step 4 turned out to matter. When OVHcloud creates a new zone, it fills it with its own defaults: an A record pointing at a parking page, and MX records pointing at OVHcloud's mail servers. If I had switched the nameservers without checking, my email would have gone to a mail server I don't use. I deleted those defaults before importing mine.
Once the nameservers switched, nothing visibly changed, which is exactly what you want. The site, Matrix, the fediverse and my email kept working the whole time.
The transfer
With the DNS already sitting at OVHcloud, the transfer itself was just paperwork. I unlocked the domain at Name.com, got the transfer code, ordered the transfer at OVHcloud and paid.
There's a bit of a timing worry with a transfer the night before expiry. A transfer can take up to five days, and I didn't want Name.com charging me the $59.99 renewal on the way out. Two things helped:
My card at Name.com had expired. Their auto-renew tried, failed and emailed me about it. For once that was good news.
The transfer was fast. It went through less than two hours after I paid. When I found Name.com's "Expedite Transfer" button a bit later and clicked it, I got an error, because there was nothing left to expedite.
The domain is now registered through OVHcloud, with a new expiry date of October 24th, 2027.
Fixing my email while I was at it
While going through the zone, I noticed that my Proton Mail setup had never been finished. SPF was there, but DKIM was missing. DKIM is the signature that lets other mail servers check that an email claiming to be from dotmavriq.life actually came from my mail provider. Without it, my mail had a better chance of landing in someone's spam folder.
Proton gives you three CNAME records for it. I added them at OVHcloud, and a few minutes later Proton emailed me to say my emails were now signed.
Then I tightened DMARC from p=none to p=quarantine. With p=none, a mail server that sees a forged email from my domain just lets it through. With quarantine, it puts it in spam. Before changing it, I checked my server for anything else that sends mail as dotmavriq.life, since anything unsigned would also start getting flagged. The only other sender was Hantera, my habit tracker, and its email is already signed through Resend.
Proton is Swiss, by the way, so the email didn't need to move at all. Only the records pointing at it did.
That's it
Desktop, media storage, server and now the domain. The big pieces are all European now: openSUSE, Bunny.net, Hetzner, Proton and OVHcloud.
C'est la vie, again.