If you forget, or don't have money, or whatever reason else for not renewing the domain, you will lose access to many of your accounts more than likely.
I get the rationale, but I feel that this is bad advice.
A well-run, reputable domain registrar will give you plenty of warnings when a domain is coming up for renewal. And when the domain expires there is usually [1] a period afterwards when it can be retrieved before anyone else can buy it.
Set the domain to auto-renew, make sure the registrar has your payment details, set calendar reminders. Its not difficult.
The alternative is gmail or similar, where you can lose access to your email, and perhaps the root of your digital "identity", at the whim of some hair-trigger algorithm [2] and be left unable to even communicate with the provider to get it fixed.
So get a domain from a decent registrar. Pay several years in advance. Keep your payment and contact details up to date.
[1] based on my experience of Cloudflare and other registrars
[2] plenty of examples of this on HN and elsewhere
I completely disagree… the upsides of having a domain completely outweigh the downsides for me
Domains are cheap, $10 a year, and you can set up auto renew, or renew them for years in advance.
Most registrars also send you alerts (e.g. the registrar I use, Porkbun, sends alerts at 60, 30, 5 days before expiry)
Migrating to a new email service is a colossal task if you don’t use your own domain which you can just point at the new one, and if your email service decides to kick you out, you lose access to all the same accounts as if your domain expired.
My domain expiring is totally within my control. My email provider kicking me out is not.
Was just going to chime in with this. Goldeneye on n64 Xmas day, selection box and sticky controller. What I wouldn’t do to feel that innocent safety again.
I don’t know how accurate this is. I just loaded up Walmart and Targets sites and they load very quickly and navigating between pages is snappy as well. What’s your metric for performance?
