New Domain and Free Domains
Posted Friday 06 September 2019 at 19:47
Estimated reading time: 2 mins
As you may have noticed, my domain has changed and the old domain is dead. Probably a bad move if I had a lot of followers, but, in this case fortunately, I don't. The followers I do have I likely know personally, so they know where I've moved to, but to anyone out there who I wasn't aware of who's going to deeply miss my bi-yearly posts, I'm sorry.
You may be wondering what would prompt such a decision, which brings me onto the second part of my title -- free domains. Up until recently my site was running on a .tk domain. In the past I've not had much trouble with these domains, but I've also never really kept something running on one for very long, which I suspect is why, all of a sudden, my free domain stopped being free.
Yep, that's right. My free domain suddenly became a paid free domain, with them wanting £8.22 from me to renew it. Why is this, you might wonder. Apparently my domain is now recognised as "special", presumably because something's been running on it for a long period of time. Now I'm not trying to have a dig at their business model -- they have to make money somehow, even if that is through renewal charges -- but I'm not paying £8.22 for something I got for free.
For starters, .tk and other associated free domains, are commonly seen as untrustworthy. Understandably, too; a domain being freely available means it's easier to get hold of it for malicious purposes. But from my perspective, as someone using the domain completely legitimately, it's an unfortunate stigma to carry. As a result, I figured that, if I was going to be paying for a domain anyway, I may as well get a decent and reliable one. And here we are.
Free domains are certainly useful for small projects. If you just want to test something out and need a domain for yourself, they're ideal. There's no need to invest money unnecessarily. But for anything you intend on keeping around for more than just a couple of months, biting the bullet and investing in a decent domain is worthwhile.
I may not post very frequently here but there's constantly projects going on in the background. There are a few things I intend on putting up soon, some back-end and some publicly available. If you're one of the few who actually read this, cheers, and look forward to updates.