Decreasing Domains
It just dawned on me that I've finally made good progress in decreasing the number of domains that I own. I've historically purchased domains on a whim; when I'm bored or sitting on a bar stool somewhere, I'll grab my phone and check if random domains that pop into my head are available. While the overwhelming majority of them would be taken, I'd occasionally strike upon something that hadn't been snatched up. I'd typically always buy them... and then do nothing with them the vast majority of the time. They were basically like ICANN Pokémon.
A little over a year ago, I decided that I would start to let some of my domains lapse through attrition. I turned off automatic renewal and figured that if I didn't come up with a use for a particular domain by the time I started getting alerts about the fact that it was expiring, then I didn't really need it in the first place. At the time I owned 9 domains. To date, I've let 5 of them expire. 1 was something I used for a skunk works project at my job that ended up becoming fairly critical to their workflow, so I transferred that domain to the company when I left that job. (Humorously, I never expensed this domain — even after it became “production” — because it renewed on the same date as laifu.moe, and I didn't want to submit the receipt showing both domains. 😅) That leaves me with:
- This domain.
- The aforementioned laifu.moe, the domain I've actually owned the longest, and the only domain I've ever purchased as a “joke” and actually done something with.
- A random domain I bought prior to deciding that I'd rather just use looped.network as my primary domain. I'm letting this one expire, though it has until next summer.
It's typically been easy for me to justify the expense of domains because I tend to use (relatively) inexpensive TLDs. I believe the most expensive domain I've ever purchased as a .io that was around $40 USD for a year. While TLDs which are $10 to $15 a year are a bit more palatable, they still add up when I've got a large number of them... and that cost is doing absolutely nothing if I do nothing with the domain. Today I'd only consider purchasing a domain if I have an immediate use for it; I no longer buy any just because it's a fun name that I want to hold on to. I've actually had a handful of scenarios where I thought of decent domain names and discovered they were available, but so far I've been walking the straight and narrow without buying them.
While it's a little silly to keep a domain for a single web page, I don't see myself ditching laifu.moe any time soon since my inner weeb likes it too much. looped.network hosts several websites (like this one) and a few servers/services that I run, so it's also pretty locked in. At this point I think I'd have to have something pretty outstanding that I wouldn't just host it on another subdomain of looped.network.