barrass.dev

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 (at best) posts, I’m sorry.

You may wonder 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. I suspect this may be why my free domain all of a sudden stopped being free. Yep, you read that right. My free domain suddenly became a paid free domain, with a £8.22 fee to renew it. The reason? Apparently my domain is now recognised as “special”, presumably because something’s been running on it for a long period of time. I’m not trying to have a dig at their business model – they have to make money somehow, and the ICANN fees won’t pay themselves – but even £8.22 seems a little unreasonable in my opinion.

For starters, .tk and other free domains have a reputation of being untrustworthy. Understandably, too; a domain being freely available naturally makes it easier to get hold of and abuse. But from my perspective as a legitimate user, it’s an unfortunate stigma to carry. If I now have to pay for a domain that already carries that stigma, it’s kind of a waste; I get none of the advantages of a “free” domain, and all of the disadvantages!

Free domains can certainly be useful for small projects. If you just want to test something out and need a domain for yourself, they’re ideal – you can test something without incurring a financial cost. But for anything you intend on keeping around for more than just a couple of months, investing in something that won’t be flagged by spam filters is probably a good idea.

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.