Domain Clutter

For years I've been accumulating domains. It's just natural when you get an idea for a website or development project to start thinking up domain names. Registering a domain name is the individual developer equivalent of the corporate new project T-shirt design.

And for years, I used Yahoo Domains to register domains. Their service was generally pretty good and I didn't think much about them.

But once you've got 15 or 20 domains, the annual renewal cost starts to really add up. So this year, I started doing two things.

First, I started pruning my list of domains. It's natural to think that some of these are valuable but you know what? They're not. There are domain name appraisal services (like this one) that claim they could tell me what my domains are worth, but I suspect they're worth less than the cost of the appraisal. I could maybe sell them on one of those domain auction sites for a few bucks, but it's not like I own pets.com or broadcast.com; nobody's going to pay a million dollars for inandaround.ca.

But that still leaves me with a dozen or so I want to keep.

Back when I registered some of these domains, Yahoo's $34.95/year price wasn't so bad. Today, it's expensive. They use MelbourneIT as their registrar, and that's their price. It's high, and there's no reason to pay that much simply for domain registration.

My long term plan is to move all these domains to DreamHost, where the domain costs $9.95/year and I get free hosting. $9.95/year isn't the lowest price I've seen, but I've been very happy with their service and their online tools, and the $3/year I could save isn't worth the trouble of having my hosting and registration with two different companies.