Project £20k: Holy F***!

I recently mentioned on twitter that I had successfully secured my domain with a .uk TLD, taking my total up to some 43 domains. Domains are cheap — little more than a bottle of wine — why worry about owning a healthy collection, right?

Except that therein lies a problem that I’ve clearly been ignoring for years: domains are only cheap one at a time. Much like when you go into the shop for a bottle of milk and spend a tenner on junk that you don’t need, buying domains forces your hand into renewing domains, the cost of hosting and in some cases the add-on of WHOIS protection for another couple of bucks.

As it turns out, I’ve been spending over £300 per year on domains. And then another £675+ on 3 different hosting accounts to keep each site live. Over £1000 of outgoing web-related costs for some 5 years or more. That’s a quarter of my Project £20k goal without even thinking about it. At over £83 per month it’s roughly a fifth of my monthly mortgage repayment, or a month’s shopping, or 2 days at nursery for one of the kids, or a month’s petrol, or anything way more bloody important than a bunch of websites that sit there taking up my time for sod all reward.

Holy fuck.

If I’m going to raise £20,000 I need to be saving more money than I spend and I’m not going to do that wasting money on half-arsed websites! After a little persuasion from Gaz, I cancelled 6 domains and listed 6 more for sale (to try and cover costs) on the namecheap marketplace – they’ll be cancelled if they don’t sell. I will probably cancel a handful more before the year is out. I’m merging two of my hosting accounts to bring the cost down by ~£200.

I am aiming to halve my yearly outgoing web costs and meet goal 9 of my 14 things for 2014 too. Wish me luck…

3 Comments

  1. At first I didn’t get why people hoarded domains, but then I realized you built yourself a web empire over this past decade or so… But I think you made the right decision to sell some of your domains. I hope it works out for you!

  2. Wow, that really added up. I have four domains and I’m only using two. I keep telling myself I’ll make good use of them all so I don’t feel like I’m wasting money, but I don’t even know what to do with them. And I still want to register more. Meep.

  3. That is the hard part. They seem so pretty and cheap, and then when you actually calculate the cost, it gets pretty crazy.

    I hope you sell the ones you don’t need and merge everything with no trouble!