Most people's first move when they decide to start a site is to buy a domain. Mine was to spend five and a half years writing without one and still be arguing with myself about it.
When I planned the blog at the end of 2020, the first thing I thought about was finding a way to avoid buying a domain, avoid renting a server, and avoid locking myself into an existing blogging platform. Static site plus GitHub Pages or Vercel hit every requirement.
My reasons for not buying were simple: I had no idea whether I'd keep writing. And I don't especially like a project that begins with spending money on gear. I get why that works for some people — it's a decent psychological kickoff and a quiet reminder about sunk cost. But my default mode is that the moment something stops being "I want to" and becomes "I should," I feel resistance, even when nobody imposed the should on me but me. Then I won't do the thing I actually wanted to do. Contradictory, right? A few years back, while doing those very unscientific online personality quizzes for a post about myself, I learned this pattern is apparently called "rebel": "I do what I want, in my own way. If you try to make me do something—even if I try to make myself do something—I'm less likely to do it." Sometimes I find my own stubbornness exhausting too.
After two or three years of steadily posting, I was fairly confident I'd stick with it, so the question shifted from whether to buy a domain to how long to buy it for. Would prices go up? Was prepaying five or ten years absurd? If I bought short and renewal got expensive, do I change addresses or pay the ransom? And if I did change, what happens to all the places I'd told people to find me? Around that time I kept stumbling on personal sites that had quietly gone dead after a year or two — several of them from my own blogroll — and I found the combination of no updates and no notice genuinely irritating. Better to keep a boring github.io address that at least stays put.
Now I'm in year six. Posting is irregular but ongoing. So why is the domain itch back?
First, after moving from github.io to vercel.app, the site's visibility on Google collapsed to nearly nothing. github.io carries real weight in search, and a handful of my posts used to sit at the top of results on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo. I'm not chasing traffic, but if something I wrote might be useful to someone, I'd like search engines to be able to surface it. Isn't that sort of the point of the internet?
Second, this year's visitor stats became useless. Traffic from Singapore spiked to absurd levels with near-zero time on page — a hundred or two hundred visitors inside a minute or two, more than once. I added a robots.txt to block bots, but that's an honor system. Without a domain, I can't use much of what Cloudflare offers for free, so my defenses are thin.
Third, I've been curious about DNS for a while. Every time someone tosses around Nginx, TLS, or CNAME in conversation, I feel the irritation of reading encrypted text. Having a domain to experiment on would probably turn those words into something concrete fast.
So I went browsing through registrars, and my picky-plus-stingy combination got impatient with the choosing almost immediately. All-numeric .xyz is the cheapest, but come on — that doesn't look like a serious site. .com is the respectable choice, though it feels a bit stiff for a personal blog.
Should I get a full-word domain and keep my current site name? The name was picked somewhat carelessly back then. Change it? I'm terrible at naming things and my head already hurts. And I refuse to just string together meaningless letters. Why am I like this?
Then there's the price. .com is stable, roughly $10 a year at Spaceship, but subsidizing my own site to the tune of about a hundred yuan annually still annoys me. The cheaper options, .vip and .top at three or four dollars, clearly fail my aesthetic standards.
Buying things is such a chore.