I had a thought experiment: if someone offered a million dollars for yoursunny.com, would I sell?
It's 10 minutes until the offer deadline. I'm looking at a flashing Accept Offer button. If I press this button, I'll receive a million dollars of life changing money, in exchange for selling the yoursunny.com domain. But, am I still @yoursunny if I give up my namesake domain?
I recall Cool URIs don't change. Thousands of webpages have linked to my blog posts, thousands of readers have bookmarked my technical guides. If I sell the domain, all these URIs will change, all these links will be broken, and I will let my readers down.
My mind flashed back to the day I registered the domain: I showed up at the bank, ¥65 cash in hand to wire to the domain reseller. Then I remembered the nights I spent building the website, the knocks on my dorm door by classmates who found the website down affecting course material downloads, the phone calls to hosting companies requesting deals and resolving issues. Am I ready to give up all these memories for a million dollars?
5 minutes left.
I looked at the bank account: account balance is $1200, just enough to pay rent and VPS renewal fees.
If I accept the order, I'll be able to afford a car, afford a vacation, and maybe a down payment on a house.
I can also re-launch the website on my secondary domain, yoursunny.dev, and upgrade to a dedicated server.
The domain buyer did offer to setup perpetual 301 redirects for the blog posts and technical guides, and include a small banner on the frontpage linking to my new website, so that the link breakage won't be so impactful.
Should I do it?
1 minute left. I opened the WHOIS report, took a screenshot for the domain that I have owned for the past 20 years. In less than a minute, the domain would no longer be mine.
A few seconds left. I moved the cursor to the Accept Offer button, with my shaky hands. I pressed the button.
"Dynadot needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding." "Verifying you are human. This may take a few seconds." A staircase appeared, followed by traffic lights. I frantically clicked through the tiles, as the timer ticks toward 00:00.
"Offer expired."
The universe, or Cloudflare, has made the decision.
yoursunny.com is still mine, until the next million dollar offer.