RFC 6762 defines the TLDs you can use safely in a local-only context:

*.intranet
*.internal
*.private
*.corp
*.home
*.lan

Be a selfhosting rebel, but stick to the RFCs!

do not use .local, as tempting as it may be

use .home personally

“.home.arpa” for A records.

I run my own CA and DNS, and can create vanity TLDs like: a.git, a.webmail, b.sync, etc for internal services. These are CNAMEs pointing to A records.

I own lastname.me and lastname.dev and everything public is lastname.me and everything local ist lastname.dev. I don’t have a VPS anymore so the .me domain is a bit useless and only relevant for emails these days but I’d have something like nc.lastname.me for my public next cloud instance and docs.lastname.dev for my paperless instance that I don’t want to have on somebody else’s machine.

maybe not directly answer for you, but I just literally bought 4 domains for 3 euro per year (renews at the same price!) 5 minutes ago :D.

The catch - it has to be 9 numbers.xyz (see https://gen.xyz/1111b for details).

I have an io domain - mylastname.io

AD domain is home.mylastname.io

A place I put most apps running on my Kubernetes cluster is *.apps.mylastname.io

lastname. systems

I used to own lastname.cloud and foolishly let that expire. Its one of my biggest regrets.

i have owned a .com since 1997. i use that.

I use .home as my internal network DNS name. I tend to name my servers and network based off movie-AI stuff; i.e., VIKI, Jarvis, Skynet, Mother, etc.

I have registered domains as well, I am just waiting on my fiber to finally get installed before I start messing wtih DNS records and certs.

I use .home for the Windows domain/internal hosts and .online for my external domain as it was cheap, and the name I wanted was available.

To access self hosted stuff with working SSL certs,.I set up split DNS. On the internal DNS sever, I have a forward lookup zone for the .online domain with static A records for .online and all the subdomains pointing at the internal address of a caddy reverse proxy.

Technically every machine is supposed to have a registered TLD, even on a local network. That said, I use .lan

I had problems with .local because it’s used for MDNS and too lazy to figure out how that works so now I just use lan but I also own a .com domain so I have started to use that more

.com lol. I got a 6 letter domain that makes for me. I should check out .local though. I could .com for my website and .local for my home network using the same domain name.

If you want to avoid problems, use TLD that are assigned for this purpose, for example .home.arpa or .home or .lan or .private etc.

Avoid using .local because its already used by mDNS.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special-use_domain_name

.local is mDNS - and I’m using that, saves me so much hassle with split-horizon issues etc.

I also use global DNS for local servers (AAAA records on my own domain), again, this eliminates split-horizon issues. Life is too short to deal with the hassle of running your own DNS server.