Posted 04-Oct-2026 in Technology

Confessions of a Middle-Aged Domain Hoarder

I personally own well over 100 domains. A select few of them are actually live. The rest? Parked, forwarded, or none of the above.

These domains cost me real money. For whatever reason, I've chosen to be loyal to a domain registrar that doesn't have the best prices, unless you jump through some weird hoops with their discount program.

I've been thinking a lot about the cost of things, especially the things that realistically have no value in my life. Owning a bunch of domains is a flex of my own ignorance in a lot of ways, and that doesn't spark joy.

The majority of my unused domains fall into two categories: nostalgia and defensive registration.

Nostalgia domains tend to be domains I actually did something with once upon a time. My thought is, if I own a domain that once housed something with my name attached, I'd prefer it not fall into the hands of the bad guys.

Thing is, I've had some domains actually fall into the hands of people with nefarious intentions. They find a domain that still has some inbound link juju, and will throw up a lookalike page they mined from The Internet Archive.

From there, they let it cook for a bit then out of the blue, they swap the content for something sketchy. From experience, it's usually illegal gambling sites, and eventually the domain, now effectively destroyed, becomes available again.

The matter of the defensive registration I usually do is also attached to a traumatic tale. Having worked at startups the majority of my career, I've been through scenarios where a company's name is a bit too similar to an incumbent. You typically get a letter and rebrand, no big deal.

But that's not the story. My story involves somebody buying a country-specific TLD of my exact brand name. Then had the audacity to beef with me over how I was causing confusion in the marketplace for him.

Doesn't help that my open source code at the time was most likely what he was building his business on.

Things eventually cooled off and he rebranded, and I have a cool story about how I own the domain he once had. But that's not all, I own a TON of different variations of the name, on various TLDs. And on other projects I will usually end up with 2+ domains because I'll be compelled to secure the typo or worse, the domain with "the" in front of it.

The thing is, while I own a lot of these little defensive plays, I don't own them all. There's so many TLDs out there now that it's not worth it at all. Even if I did happen to get them all, there's going to be new ones later. Plus the pricing on some of them are outrageous in comparison.

So I'm entering my Frozen era, and I've been letting domains go.

It's hard. Some of them were premium domains when I originally procured them. Some of them I've owned longer than I've been a parent. But none of that means they have any value, especially when so many trendy new TLDs can be secured instead.

In addition to the great domain culling, I'm moving domain registrars. Reducing my domain cache by 50% and then cutting cost by 50% on the chosen few maths pretty well from my perspective.

This is going to take a while too. I'm transferring domains out as they come up for renewal, so I got at least another year of this.

Also, some of the domains I'm cutting point to live sites. Dumb sites, but live nonetheless. I've had to ask myself, do I really need a domain for every dumb game I've vibed out this year?

The answer is no I don't, and I definitely didn't need to grab 3 domains for that one flip flop game.

This whole process has sparked the idea in my head that maybe I should be doing more hosting here, on my personal website. I used to call it my blog, but it's more than that, it's my web presence.

This opens up a whole new issue, a lot of my dumb projects are LLM generated. I still write 100% of the content in my blog posts, but I can't beat my chest that my site is 100% written by me.

But I think that's fine, it's still my little corner of the web and I can do what I want. Also, it's been kind of fun to be blatantly obvious about something being AI slop, rather than being disingenuous about it.

I'm hoping that by cutting loose the excess domain baggage, it will free me up for more focused effort on the things I do care about.

:wq