There’s something strangely addictive about messing with domains. I’ve probably spent close to 10,000 RMB just on registrations over the years, and coming back to blogging recently made me realize I’d never really added it all up before. Once I did, it was one of those “wait, I spent how much?” moments.

Looking back, this probably started back in the BBS era. I used to read books like Hacker Defense and roam around forums such as Green Troops, Eagle Alliance, Red Hacker Alliance, Hacker Defense, and Hacker Animation Bar. In those days, people who cared about technology seemed to have their own independent blogs, and as a little fan of that world, I also wanted a place of my own.

Back then, hosting was slow and awkward even when you paid for it. It was nothing like what we have now. Filing for ICP approval also didn’t seem like much trouble at the time—just submit some documents and wait for it to go through.

The first domain I can trace back was probably an .org address I registered somewhere around 2005 to 2007 at Wanwang, before the name Alibaba Cloud even existed. After that, I kept registering more and more. Things got especially wild around 2010, when I had been working for about two years and my salary was just enough for one person to live comfortably. That was also around the time I found the purchase record for the domain I’m using now, 6angel, in my Alibaba Cloud account, and I had to laugh—this thing and I really do have some kind of fate.

Setting everything else aside, .com domains were genuinely cheap back then. I didn’t even take the domain I’m using now seriously for a long time. It was around for 2015–2016 and 2018–2019, but there were gaps in between, and I don’t even know who held it during those periods. Before 2025, I also have no idea whose hands it had passed through. Then I came back to blogging recently, saw that it was available again, and grabbed it right away for the blog. After checking my old domain orders today, I really felt like this domain and I were meant to cross paths.

There was a time when I had so many domains that it was almost ridiculous. Every year when renewal time came around, I’d get a headache. One year, the renewal bill was so high that I could blow out a credit card and end up paying it off in installments. After thinking it over, I realized I wasn’t a domain speculator. So in the end, I let them all go.

Now that I’m thinking back, I can’t even remember every domain I used for blogging. I’ll write down the ones I can still recall:

Domains I used for blogs before

1. ~~laob.org~~
2. ~~lpij.com~~
3. ~~xblog.org~~
4. ~~oyelu.com~~
5. ~~lengyuze.org~~
6. ~~9angel.com~~
7. ~~linupx.com~~
8. ~~blackskill.com~~
9. ~~worksinger.com~~
10. ~~fightinger.com~~

There were actually quite a few others that I also used as blogs, but most of them have already faded from memory. Altogether, I probably had around 200 domains, and I ended up releasing those too. At one point I went through a pretty rough blow, lost the energy to keep tinkering with these virtual possessions, and figured it was better to let them go to people who truly wanted to use them than to leave them sitting dark and unused in my own hands.

Domains I still hold now

• pacai.live — Tencent Cloud, expires 2033-07-30
• 6angel.com — Spaceship, expires 2026-09-12
• forbloger.com — Alibaba Cloud, expires 2028-12-23
• Xudongdong.com — Spaceship, expires 2026-09-15. This is Xu Dongdong’s full pinyin; she’s an actress I like, so I’ll probably keep this one in my collection.

I have one domain at Tencent Cloud and one at Alibaba Cloud, and I’ve been thinking about whether I should move them overseas. If a domain stays in China, it’s basically frozen in place—you can’t even use forwarding properly. Even if I wanted to point it to this blog, I’d still feel like the money wasn’t wasted. But when forwarding itself isn’t allowed, it feels a bit like part of the rights you paid for have been handed over to someone else. If you buy something with your own money, there’s still supposed to be some difference in how you can use it.

That’s why in the past, whenever I started a blog, I would make domain filing the very first thing to handle. This time, after coming back, I really don’t feel like dealing with ICP filing anymore. Filing only matters if you want to use domestic hosting, get faster access inside China, or rely on domestic image and file storage. None of that is especially useful to me now. If I want image hosting, I can always solve it with a U.S. or Hong Kong host. Everything can be solved if I really want to solve it. But when it comes to blogging, what matters most is still writing.

Honestly, I’d even tell anyone who gets obsessed with domains: even if you’re feeling empty, don’t keep spinning your wheels on domains. A domain itself has no value until the holder gives it meaning. And even if you never use a domain at all, if you spend ten years writing down what you lived through in a notes app, that’s still a serious kind of wealth. The real wealth is in the words you leave behind, and the things you remember.

Today happened to be 9/18, and while writing this I bought yet another domain on impulse: Noanel.me — Spaceship, expires 2026-09-18.

The theme of the blog is that I’m definitely not some good-hearted type. That thought kept coming back to me. I’m not an angel, and I don’t claim to be a devil either. I can do good, but I won’t show mercy to bad people.