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5 domains I’m letting expire over the next year

Posted on by Doug Belshaw
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It’s easy to hoard domains, to think that you’re going to do something with them in future. It’s also easy to feel an obligation to keep paying to renew domains that you don’t use any more.

The time has come for me to let five domains that I’ve used over the last decade or so expire at various points within the next twelve months. Ideally, I’d like to transfer each of them over to someone who would be willing to do something interesting/useful rather than them just going into the hands of spammers.

Here’s the list, and please let me know if you’re interested in any of them, so we can have a chat! I’m not looking for payment, just ensuring that the ‘Google juice’ doesn’t go to shady characters…

The unlinked domains above are currently being redirected to dougbelshaw.com/thesis

Please note that I’m not in any particular hurry, and that I’ll favour people who I already know / are in my network 😊

Some web-hosting advice, please…

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

Last month when I opened up our credit card statement, I looked with horror at the amount I was being charged for webhosting. It said that MediaTemple, my current web hosts for this blog, learning.mrbelshaw.co.uk, edte.ch and historyshareforum.com were charging me almost £20 per month for the privilege. This, apparently, is due to the ‘amount of MySQL activity’ on my account. 😮

Last summer, I transferred from Bluehost – with whom I’d been very happy – due to MediaTemple’s well-publicised ‘Grid Hosting’ and their ability to host domain names such as .ch (needed for edte.ch). Now, however, I find that my websites take longer to load, their customer service is below average, and they’re over-charging me.

I’d love to simply go back to Bluehost. That’s not really an option, however, due to their inability to host .ch domains. I had a look at going with HP-backed and much-advertised One.com, but they don’t allow ‘download-related’ sites – historyshareforum.com is for the sharing and downloading of resources.

So I’d like your recommendations please. My criteria are:

  • Good value (i.e. reasonably cheap!)
  • Good customer support (quick response time)
  • Support for a wide range of domain extensions

Ideally, I’d also like the servers to be based in the UK. It makes fast loading times of the websites for the majority of my visitors more likely, you see… 😀

Image credit: The Web that is Us by ecstaticist @ Flickr

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