"There's a sucker born every minute" -- usually attributed to P. T. Barnum. The people who got sucked into buying into this "Joyent ending ‘lifetime’ hosting accounts" hustle probably got the greatest bargain of their lives. I'll bet they were mostly young folks, ever chasing after that proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow (although some never quit). Hoping for endless service with no further incentive for the provider. What a priceless lesson at such a small cost! This company has actually taught one of life's great lessons for a truly paltry sum!
Anyway, here's what I do: I register my domains at nearlyfreespeech.net. They have a somewhat limited number of different TLDs available, and at about $9 per year, are not cheap (or "free"), but certainly not exorbitant. But their integrity is rock-solid. One time I let my domain expire for a couple weeks, an alarming circumstance. But they restored it for free after I simply payed the fee (this can only work for a limited time, of course). My old (and reliable) previous host and registrar would have charged me about $200 to get it back! So the $9 is like cheap insurance.
I use asmallorange.com as my host. They charge as little as $35 per YEAR, with $0.50 per GB per month for additional bandwidth. (Both of these hosts are "pay as you go.") So if I ever have a disagreement with my host, they cannot mess with my domain name! Also, my registrar uses FreeBSD servers, while my host uses Linux, and I don’t want to deal with FreeBSD (it’s probably more stable than Linux, but I know nothing about how to use it). The smallorange service (running on Linux) is chock-full of great features, including Cpanel. They have a feature inside their Cpanel that one-click installs things like WordPress, and I used it. But I chose a one-click install password that it allowed, but that the rest of Cpanel would not allow, and that lead to problems. But their customer service was right there for me, and they immediately cleared it up. Hope this doesn't sound spammy. The main point is, if you really want service, pay as you go is the way to get it. It worked great for me.
You might be interested in SourceForge's RetroShare. Direct encrypted Internet communication of all kinds between computers with no intermediate hosts.
I don't use a "generic" password to register at companies; they tend to require credit card transactions, etc.
I actually do use KeePass for several things, and I think it really is more secure than my "simple solution." Plus it keeps my data in a nifty portable "*.kdb" file. But it's just a bit clumsier to utilize. I don't use the Firefox password manager, which updates often; who knows what might happen when it does? KeePass is available at:
I intend to retain my independence on the Internet! None of this "cloud" stuff for me! I will have nothing to do with Facebook, and their identity monopoly. I would much rather just start my own blog:
My WordPress.com site can always be transferred to a host of my choosing (especially if I register a similar domain name) (and not at giant GoDaddy).
I simply will not post on sites that require Facebook, or Blogger, or Yahoo! accounts to log in. Period.
Except for banking (which I try to avoid online) and really special logins, I simply use one very-hard-to-crack password for everything, like "bluefrogsridelogsatsunset". People argue about how hard it is to crack passwords, and what kinds of passwords are secure, but I'm pretty sure that no one (except perhaps the government) can really crack a password such as the one above. This solution is good enough for me!
Someone seems to be taking this extremely seriously. I just tried to post it on a large, paid WordPress hosted blog, and the blog refused to accept it three times in a row. Then I "TinyURLed" it and it went right through, and was posted as an ordinary "TinyURL"!!!
Um, no. I'm a "formerly autistic" (the irony should freak you) researcher in (classical) information theory and linguistics. You will hopefully get your answer at linguistics.name, when I get around to it. There is no charge to just learn the material. I do claim to own the theory itself, So you can't teach it without a license from me. Life is hard y'know?