The risk of domain names!

[Melooon]

So an interesting bit of trivia for you that I discovered recently! There have been discussions in the past about why people go inactive on forums, often the easy answer is to say "well the forum wasn't right for them".. however, while working on the surf club I noticed a trend that almost every inactive forum account with a custom domain name links to a dead website.

It seems like a lot of people get into web making as a hobby, get set up with a custom domain and then a year later when it has expired, they don't keep it up    Thats kinda worrying to me, because if you abandon your neocities.org site it's not an issue, the site just sits there. However, if you have a custom domain name and you let it expire, your website is gone!

Domain names are cheap at first, but they are actually a big commitment (like getting a puppy?) if you are not willing to look after them in the years to come, then you really should not be getting one!

Im not sure that there's any easy solution to this, but it's worth being cautious when you step into a domain purchase  Maybe stick with your neocities.org domain for the first year and see how things go! (Spoken as someone who has dozens of domains and can't get rid of any of them ever) 

[Cele]

I have 1 domain, I have bought it for many years and I think the registrant would send a reminder message anyways if it was about to expire. Definitely was planning on keeping it into the future. I guess I might hoard them more if I had the money to waste but I truly don't.

[loren]

i sat on the decision to get a custom domain for a few months. not a whole year after starting my site, like you suggested, but i still thought about it a lot before committing! i realized that if i wanted to change domain names later, i'd still have to keep paying for the current one so that old links could be redirected to the new site. doing that a few times could quickly get expensive, so i wanted to be really sure that i could see myself happy with my choice for many years to come.
it's such an honor when people link to my site; breaking all of those links would make me too sad! i'll be renewing this thing forever!    

[brisray]

The worst thing about domain names is that you never actually own them. You can only lease them. There are a couple of places that let you do that for around 10 years, most places have a maximum of 4.

I have few regrets about anything, but losing my first domain name really irks me. I even wrote a webpage about it and what's happened to it over the years. It's been parked and offered up in domain auctions since 2003!

I'm not paying anything more than the normal price for it and what really bugs me is the company who owns it is dan.com and that's owned by GoDaddy who I originally got it from and who will not put it back in the pool of unused domain names for reuse.

http://brisray.co.uk/

[brisray]

That's my personal rant over.

Everyone is completely right, domain names are a commitment and you should think about it before getting one. In 10 years time, will the domain name still reflect your content or your online persona? Losing one and getting another is no big deal. The problem is, as I've found, you might not get the original back.

Once gone, you can no longer do anything do anything with it. The original link just stops working, you can't get back into the DNS records to change them, absolutely nothing.

Most registrars are pretty good at reminding you your domain names are coming up for renewal. Mine, GoDaddy, gives at least three months warning, and then reminds you another three times before it becomes inactive. You also get another month before it is no longer just available to you for renewal, you just have to pay a little extra.

Like the recent discusssion about Yesterweb, it's always a little saddening when sites I enjoy visiting just disappear. It's understandable, life gets in the way, but still disappointing.

The one bit of good news about them is that if you decide to use one, they are the only thing you absolutely have to pay for to keep your website up and running, epsecially if you self-host. Even then there are good free hosts around, and even decent professional hosting need not be that expensive. Thinking about it, I have probably spent more on electricity keeping my home server running than I would have if I used some sort of cheap hosting.

[Necrosia]

I agree with what everyone said so far about domain names but its not that different from other options like neocities today, imo.

Sure, if neocities were to close out of the blue we expect they would send us a message so we could backup our junk but the same thing happened with geocities back then, a bunch of the sites that were lost was because they were already abandoned by their owners but simply stood online while geocities existed. It's the same with neocities, if one day it stops being a viable option for its owner then a bunch of sites that are already abandoned but still online simply because neocities lets it will vanish as well.

A friend of mine has a webs free site that is a legend but webs changed owner and are forcing their users to change as well to new URLs so this is how a legend dies. Their page is still available but since its a free something.webs.com site who knows for how long it will be this way.

I read plenty of good things regarding the person who owns neocities but situations change, life changes, the unexpected happens, life, world, money problems, who knows the day of tomorrow so its a bit of illusional to expect that companies are safe from changes and will stand still forever.

[lostletters]

My only experience of "owning" a domain was when I won a free domain for 1 year. It didn't really end up living up to my expectations, and the domain name was vague enough to be evergreen, but not personally resonant. It's so hard to pick the right name for a site, and I feel like I settle for something not bad, but not great. I can see why many folks abandon them.

I've thought about leasing a domain many times over the past two decades, but it was actually neocities that made me feel like I really don't need one. I like that I can follow people to subscribe to their website updates (though that feed is mostly just clogged with people following top followed sites without a way to filter that out, so it's not nearly as useful as it could be), watching folks grow their sites in real time. I'm happy I have learned to use a static site generator, so that I have everything I need to port my whole website somewhere else if needed.