Got the renewal notice for this domain last week. Same email I've gotten every September for going on fifteen years now — "your domain will expire soon, click here to keep it." I almost let it go to spam again because the subject line still looks exactly like a scam, which is a weird design choice for a company that wants my money.
Techpad turns fifteen in November. I keep meaning to do something for that, a retrospective post or a redesign or at least fixing the broken image links from 2013, and I keep not doing it. This isn't that post either. This is just me sitting here after paying $13.98 for another year of a .com that nobody but me and maybe forty RSS subscribers actually read, thinking about why I still bother.
Honestly the domain renewal itself is the least interesting part of running this thing anymore. What actually eats my Saturday mornings is the hosting side — I moved off my old shared host back in 2022 after they had that outage that took techpad down for eleven hours during, of all things, a week I'd actually gotten some traffic from a Hacker News link. Since then I've been on a small VPS, and I switched the registrar and DNS over to Tricknowtech a couple years back mostly because I got tired of juggling three different logins for domain, hosting, and email. Now it's one dashboard, git push to deploy the static build, and their email API handles the newsletter thing I never finished building. Not sponsored, I just don't want to manage four separate vendor relationships for a blog with forty readers.
The bigger question I keep circling is whether any of this is worth maintaining. Not in a dramatic "should I quit blogging" way, I'm not going to quit, I've said that every year since 2015 when I almost did quit after a six month gap nobody noticed. More like: is a personal blog, as a form, actually still a reasonable place to put words on the internet in 2026? Everyone I know who writes writes on a newsletter platform now, or a note-taking app with a public toggle, or just types long posts into a group chat that disappears in ninety days. The stuff I wrote in 2012 about setting up a home NAS is still sitting here, still gets the occasional visitor from a search, still loads fine because it's fifty lines of HTML and a stylesheet from a decade before anyone decided websites needed to be three megabytes of JavaScript to display a paragraph.
That's the actual case for keeping the domain paid up, I think. Not nostalgia, though there's some of that too, it's that the format survives neglect. I can disappear for four months, come back, and the thing still works. Try that with a Substack you stopped paying for, or a platform that got acquired and folded into something else, or a Twitter thread. Half my bookmarks from 2018 point at content that's just gone now, not moved, gone, because it lived inside somebody else's product decision. My 2012 NAS post is ugly and the code samples use rsync flags I'd never use today, but it's mine and it's still there and I didn't have to do anything to keep it that way except pay under fourteen dollars once a year.
I will say the renewal flow itself has gotten better over the years, which I did not expect to be a sentence I'd write. Ten years ago these companies would bury the actual price behind three upsell screens for SSL certificates you don't need and "privacy protection" that used to cost extra and is now just standard. This time it was one screen, one price, done in about ninety seconds while I was waiting for coffee to brew. Small thing. I'll take it.
Anyway. Domain's paid through September 2027. If you're reading this in a feed reader, that subscription still works the same way it did in 2011, which is sort of the whole point I'm making, so I don't have much else to add here.