Several years ago I was looking for a vanity URL. You know the type that are short and sweet.

My first thought was artes.ea however there isn’t a country with .ea as their top-level domain.

Then playing about with how I say artesea I realised I could get argh.tc .tc is the top-level domain for the Turks and Caicos Islands and at only $39 it seemed a bargain. So for the last 2.5 years I’ve been using the domain name as a shorter to my blog posts, but mainly for my version of Dabr dab.argh.

However I was rather surprised to find out that my registrar this year sent me an invoice for $130 for the renewal.
So come two months time I’m letting the domain expire. I’ve already started on the work to move dab.argh.tc to dabr.artesea.co.uk including a nifty cookie transfer script so you don’t need to authenticate with twitter or change your settings again. Short URLs are no longer needed now Twitter forces the t.co links, and the other projects with be mothballed as a backup on my PC.

I couldn’t really afford to keep argh.tc in my domain portfolio at $40/year so the price rise has helped me put an end to my rash purchase.