This ignores things like slave catchers who ventured across state borders into the north to catch free men (illegally) and the south by seceding was taking hostage those people and other Americans. West Virginia exists because the government of Virginia decided they wanted to secede but the people didn’t
Also states don’t get to vote on laws and just leave and get their way anyways if the vote doesn’t go their way. That’s the agreement they made, and the only basis they had for seceding was they feared a law that would make them unable to own slaves.
The confederacy also started the war with the north by attacking fort Sumter
Certain TLD (e.g. .com, .net, .xyz) will cost a different amount per year to register. I use porkbun as well. A .com or .net may be $12.50+ per year. The cheapest domain is 9 numbers and .xyz from porkbun at 1.22/yr (e.g 123456789.xyz) but isnt as memorable. I use one of those just for external access otg with a cron script for updating the dns entries.
Also remember to hide the whois info because you will immediately start getting calls from scammers that scrape the phone number and call you telling you that you need to pay them to finish setting things up
Generic process is to register the domain, set up the DNS entries to point to your server IP, and if theres any dynamic DNS setup in your software, to enter the api key from your registrar and the domain so it can update it if your IP ever changes.