I am back up and running. After registering my previous domain on Epik I started to get spam emails and phone numbers. I did not realize that WHOIS privacy is not a default behavior with some registars. I only used Epik because it was recommended by a Hugo tutorial.
I found a few different registars that offer WHOIS privacy by default. Njalla, NameSilo, porkbun and hover. Without going into exhaustive detail, I chose porkbun because it was the cheapest for both the initial registration and renew. hover and Njalla were both expensive, and NameSilo was in the middle. If you have the money, Njalla seems like a really good option as they don’t require any personal info and accept anonymous crypto like Monero. The downside with that registar is that the company technically owns your domain to avoid the ICANN regulation stuff.
Every registrar had an awful interface for filtering and searching domains besides Epik. Few of the registrars warn you that certain domains do not support WHOIS privacy, like .us. Even worse is when a registrar claims to offer domain privacy but it isn’t enabled by default (i.e. you create your domain, the whois info is scraped by bots, and then you enable privacy from the dashboard. Stupid.)
I also set up a gitlab and transferred my SSH keys over. I think git is overkill for a project like mine, but this entire project is really an excuse to learn. There’s no harm in learning something you may not immediately use.
On the topic of SSH keys, why did nobody tell me how awesome they are? I set up passwordless login on my server and transferred my public SSH key over and boom, instant passwordless SSH login, which is great for rsync.
Computers