Time to say good bye to satad.ru!
Why a .ru domain?
The first question is why I was using a .ru domain to begin with? Why not a more recognizable tld like .com, .in or .net? Was I not aware of the bad reputation of .ru being heavily used for scams and spams?
The answer is YES! I knew it was a bad idea. I knew I will need to switch to some reputable TLDs sooner or later.
The only reason I had decided to go ahead with the satad.ru domain name was because it was really special to me.
Just remove the “dot” and go figure it out! Yes it matches my first name character by character.
So, in 2018 I registered satad.ru from Hostinger and was renewing it every year since then. Yearly cost was around 700 INR.
It was about to expire in May and I was about to renew it this time as well.
Why I’m switching now?
Imagine my surprise when I received the above mail, offering me to renew the domain for a steal deal of 82,599.00 INR!
It had to be a glitch right? So I immediately logged in to my Hostinger control panel and the final price was 97,466.82 INR!
I did check with Hostinger support regarding this and turns out they are not going to provide .ru domain services anymore due to Russia Ukraine conflict.
So, I was left with no choice other than moving to a new domain.
Choosing a new domain
What I was looking for
- It should be short. Preferably myfirstname(dot)extension.
- The extension should not have any bad reputation as that can result the website/email being blocked for some people.
- It should not be too pricey to maintain!
.com was obviously I first choice. But sadly myfirstname(dot)com was not available.
Why .dev?
- .dev is a newer TLD and particularly popular among developers. So it matches my job profile.
- satadru.dev was available!
- The HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) preload list includes the.dev TLD. This implies that all connections to.dev domains must use HTTPS; separate HSTS registration or configuration is not necessary. It is “encrypted by default” for the.dev domain.
Domain registration
After finalizing the domain name I had to choose registrar who supports .dev. I went with Cloudflare because of their no markup domain price and their awesome free services (which I was using previously as well).
The registration process was seamless and very straight forward.
That’s it. Welcome to satadru.dev!