Hello dear reader, when this post gets uploaded I should have everything rolled out for my new tld and hopefully everything is working ok. For those visiting from the website mirror outside of neocities, jordanherzstein.xyz should now redirect to jordanherzstein.com but by the beginning of next year I will not be renewing the domain. If you cared about contacting me via email before, the contact email will now simply be contact@jordanherzstein.com. I have changed both my domain name as well as my domain registrar from Namecheap to Porkbun, which you may be wondering; why have I done this?
The story behind using .xyz for a year
I bought the .xyz domain before I started hosting this site outside of neocities. I was mainly using it for some homelab projects that I wanted a domain for to eventually host a website. I found .xyz to be one of the cheaper options on a popular registrar called Namecheap (“Only $2 a year!?”), though it wouldn’t continue to be as cheap as I had anticipated… more on that later.
Why I ended my frienship with .xyz
While I initially wanted the .xyz domain for it’s price and that it was fun and quirky I’m starting to realize that if I want my website and custom email address to be the one-stop shop for reaching me I need to be a little more intelligent about the domain name chat I choose. .com is better known amongst internet users, whenever anyone is going to think about me or my website they will instinctually probably go to .com if they forget my TLD is .xyz. Also .xyz domains tend to be on blacklists for receiving emails, especially smaller email servers. Perhaps this may make a difference in my case, perhaps it will not, but if I’m going to be emailing companies when applying for jobs I’d rather not risk my emails not going through. This transition has also been made easy given that I am blessed to have an uncommon last name allowing my jordanherzstein.com to be available in the first place.
Why I ended my frienship with Namecheap
My soured experience with Namecheap is partially due to my own inexperience as well as misleading marketing on Namecheap’s website. Originally when I was looking for a domain name, Namecheap seemed to have the lowest prices of the other registrars I was looking at. However, I ended up being charged around $15 or so dollars on renewal the follwing year. A price hike is one thing, but nowhere in their original pricing when I bought my domain did they show what the renewal prices would look like, only “Retail” prices that made it seem like Namecheap was offering a discount.
This is why I have chosen to switch to Porkbun for dealing with this particular website domain. While their initial prices are more expensive, their renewal prices are slightly better and they are seemingly more transparent with the deals that they offer. Also their pig mascot is kinda cute.
I’m not trying to tell you that one of these registars are objectively better than the other, that will depend on your usecase, nor am I saying that Porkbun is the best and that I will always use it. Perhaps you only need a domain for a short period of time, so Namecheap does offer a much better deal for you. Additionally, other registrars may offer cheaper domains than the ones that I am showing you. To use Cloudflare as an example, they don’t even make a profit off of their domains so they can alledgedly offer them at a lower cost than their competitors. I didn’t choose to buy my domain from Cloudflare as I could not view their prices without creating an account, and I would like the option to change DNS servers if I wanted the control panel for DNS records on a different service so I am less entangled with one registrar. Again, depending on your use case, this may not matter to you at all. I encourage you to do your own research and not be as foolish as I when shopping for domain names.