I bought this domain and (mostly) didn’t get ripped off

I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this site, so for now, here’s a post on how I snagged it.

Here it is: aroon.in. Kind of unbelievable that this domain was even available in the first place, considering how many name.com domain squatters are out there — I’m looking at you, person who quoted me a price of $7000 for aroon.com. No thank you.

I got this domain from Google Domains, even though cheaper alternatives were available. For some reason, I felt that since Google doesn’t do individual webhosting much, they wouldn’t be inclined to rip me off in the long term. Special thanks to Google for not flagging this as a premium domain (indeed, I am not a premium person).

And then, I discovered the murky world of webhosting. I learnt the terms “shared hosting”, “Linux Hosting”, “Windows Hosting”, and a lot of other terms I was hoping to not have to deal with. “One click WordPress installation” was a promising break, but it turned out to be misleading.

Now, everything was very affordable. Problem: It was affordable on a per month basis, and pretty much every hosting service required an up-front payment of at least one year. Uff.

I tried to steer clear of GoDaddy, given that their reputation isn’t the best. But they were the only ones offering monthly hosting plans at a reasonabe price, and allowed non-recurring Net Banking as a payment option. So I did what my parents do when they can’t wash their hands but have to eat something — I muttered a risky prayer and dived right in.

Anyway, this WordPress theme looks like it should survive the test of time (even if this post doesn’t), so I think I’ll stick with this for a while. Maybe I should add a static page where the first thing you see when you visit aroon.in isn’t blog posts.

My #1 goal if I start making good money is to get an SSL certificate for this site. Not for security, because let’s admit it, a secured site icon on browsers looks very cool.

Now time to get another batchmate to set his website up too so that I don’t look like a weirdo.

EDIT (26/6): This website now has SSL, courtesy Let’s Encrypt!

Aroon.in is now HTTPS-only. So no annoying (and potentially illegal) pop-ups for MTNL users, among other things. Special thanks to @anushkagehani and @Nabilphysics for guiding me through the process! Also, shout-out to YouTuber Drac Dev for his tutorial on how to redirect all HTTP requests to HTTPS (which broke this post temporarily but that’s fine I guess).

Image credit: ‘https‘ by smemon is licensed under CC BY 2.0.