Today I embarked on a new journey. I am sunsetting my .io domain.   

You might have read about the uncertain future of the ccTLD and while it’s a reason to consider a switch it is not the reason. It’s all about the money. $71 USD to be exact. 

I’ve owned a dozen domains. Most are info pages, blogs or side projects. More recently I started using them to manage inbound email, particularly from newsletters and non-critical notifications. A couple of MX records and a service like ForwardEmail.net and you can create your unique addresses with a catch-all and a domain.  

It works great and I can easily track how my email addresses are shared and kill a specific address if it falls into the wrong (spammer) hands. It deserves a tech article write up, to be fair. That worked great until I decided to opt for a cheaper. dev domain.  Now I get to wrestle with all the newsletter platforms and websites that may or may not make it easy to change email address. 

It’s wild that in 2024 the email address is still relevant and frankly a little surprising that some platforms won’t allow, or make easy, a change. It’s also highway robbery to charge crazy prices for TLDs.  I paid $8 on Namecheap for a Google gTLD.