Sometimes you have to let go

I wrote the title of this post and saved it as an empty draft at the end of September, 2012. At the time, I was thinking of dropping some of the domain names which I owned but I was not using.

I was already thinking of doing that for at least a year, and it took me another one to actually do it, but I already managed to drop a few domains. I’m even about to drop another three in the following days.

Why? Because sometimes you have to let things go.

To let some of my undeveloped domains expire, I had to convince myself of the following:

  1. Some ideas are just bad. They may look great for a few hours or days (and usually this is the time that you buy the domain out of impulse), but after some time you realise that the idea wasn’t as good as you thought it was. Therefore, you don’t need that domain. Stop updating it!
  2. Motivation deflates. You are initially passionate about a project, but sometimes if you don’t act on it quickly, the motivation just fades away, and you’re left with a half-made project which will never be released. Just admit that you’ll never going to complete it, and loose the domain. If you change your mind after a few years (although chances are that you won’t) and the domain you dropped is not available anymore, you can get another one; it’s not the end of the world.

To be honest, dropping the undeveloped domains wasn’t that bad. The hard part was to admit that some already developed domains containing projects I spent from hours to months building them, didn’t even worth the renewal fee.

It’s not because they didn’t generate any income; I am not really bothered about that since the projects I’m most proud off are completely free to the public. It’s because I’m actually feeling embarrassed for them for multiple reasons. So embarrassed that I don’t list them anywhere and I rent a cheap shared hosting account separate from my other servers with the only purpose to host those “zombie” projects.

Enough is enough, they should been gone years ago, and -most of them- finally are.

And I’m feeling good. :)

Photo by ilovedoodle