Just a few minutes ago, I took about five minutes out of my day to keep the ownership of snivy.info, which means the domain belongs to me for another year! Yay! However, at the same time, renewing the domain does put a pretty hefty hole in my wallet. It doesn’t help that I’m not making much of a yearly income either, but I am at least glad that I do have my hands on a domain of my own (which I’ve wanted since I was at least 13 years old).
This will be the third year I’ve had snivy.info, and also the second year since it’s hosted a website. I remember buying the domain because I wanted to have a domain to my favorite Pokémon, and I was also trying to keep my costs low, in addition to privacy. I could have gone with snivy.us, but that’s when I realized that privatization of information is not available to the .us TLD by law. From there, I found a similar price with snivy.info, and a little call to my domain registrar’s customer service allowed me to easily switch over to the .info TLD.
I would definitely recommend the extra $10 or so to keep your information private when registering a domain if it’s available. If you don’t privatize, then your personal information (such as telephone number, full name, physical address, email address, etc.) are all published in the domain’s WHOIS.
Overall, having a domain is pretty cool! However, be prepared to pay the costs to renew it, whether it’d be annually, or biannually. I pay between $20-25 total to keep the domain renewed, and also to protect my personal information from being published. Oh, did I mention that server hosting is not included in this? My registrar does offer hosting, but I prefer to use an external hosting service, which can cost anywhere between $5-10 per month. If only we could just all self-register our domains directly through ICANN at an affordable price…
Anyways, I’m interested in knowing this: do any of you guys have your own domain name? How is your registrar with rates and renewal?
Until next time!