I saved over $300 by cleaning up my custom domains

Over the years I've accumulated a bunch of digital assets, and while most of those are things that I can keep using (effectively) forever, some of them keep costing me money whether I'm using them or not.

A big category for me (and maybe you if you're anything like me) are domains and web servers that run little services. They don't cost a ton on their own, but they add up, so today I went through my domains and servers and decided what stays and what goes.

Domains

• birchtree.me obviously lives on, and it's the only domain on this list I fully expect to own for my whole life if I can.
• quickbinlookup.com is low-key my most successful side hustle but I don't really talk about it. Google for "BIN lookup" and it's going to be one of the first results (if not the first one).
• birchtree.blog is getting retired. Apparently it's used by my micro.blog account that I haven't used in years. This will expire in May 2024.
• mattbirchler.com is sticking around, but I'm redirecting it (see servers section). Apparently I'm also using this for my Bluesky verification, so I guess I should keep it for that too...just in case.
• abetterghost.com is getting retired. This was a site I made when I just began doing YouTube and thought a series of videos about self-hosting Ghost would be a good series, and a Ghost blog to send people to would be nice as well. Turns out that's not what I want to maintain, so the videos are now unlisted and the site is down as of today.
• birchtree.xyz is getting retired. This was what I used for my newsletter email domain, but I don't do the newsletter anymore and don't plan on doing it anytime soon.
• quickreviews.app sticks around as I still use this webpage every week, and a small, but growing number of other people do as well.
• mattisntfeeling.social is getting retired and was never used. I bought this before realizing that the below domain was better for my Mastodon server.
• isfeeling.social is my Mastodon server name, so it's sticking around.

All in all, that's:

• 5 domains sticking around, costing $112/year in renewal fees
• 4 domains going away, saving me $99 per year in renewal fees

Cutting my domain renewal costs nearly in half feels pretty great.

Servers

I run all my web servers on DigitalOcean, which I think has a great mix of pricing, performance, and UIs for managing things. This list will line up relatively well with the domains section above, but is a bit shorter.

• Birchtree will carry on, of course
• Quick BIN Lookup will also carry on
• Quick Reviews will as well
• My custom portfolio site is migrating to an OMG.LOL page (mattbirchler.com will redirect there soon) and the server will be killed as soon as I do the DNS updates
• A Better Ghost is gone

In terms of cost, we've gotta switch to monthly:

• Birchtree and the 2 "Quick" sites combined cost $27/month
• The two servers removed save me $20/month
• OMG.LOL costs about $1.66/month

Overall, that's $18.34 saved per month.

Overall Cost Benefits

Our final numbers are pretty amazing for just a few minute's work (this blog post took longer to do than making these changes) I'm saving myself $319 over the course of the year. That's not "change my life" money, but it's not nothing, and it's the same as cancelling like 3 streaming services, which ain't bad.

If you've got a bunch of domains or little servers that you've accumulated over the years, it might be a good idea to check on them and see which are still worth your investment.