It's a bit of a complicated story, but I had lost my farrierservices.net domain. I first bought the domain all the way back in the fall of 1996 and had kept it going until a series of events ended up in a lapse on the domain early this year. I ended up losing farrierservices.net and equine1.com at the same time.
The short version of the story is that I changed web hosts and for some reason, I couldn't get those domains transferred. In my state of burn out at the time, I just said the hell with it and let them both go.
Equine1.com has a price tag of about $500.00, so I'm not interested in that, but fortunately, farrierservices.net was the standard price and I snagged it back up just now.
It hasn't even finished the registration process, but I am kind of stoked that I did it. I have been thinking about doing it for a couple of weeks and just decided, what the hell. I love building websites and it is a bit of nostalgia. That website has been a big part of my life for such a long time. Really, its kind of neat knowing that it is truly one of the longest running and oldest URLs on the Internet.
I'm not sure if its longevity has anything to do with it, but it has always been a top performer on Google. Pretty much anything I put on it has historically been above the fold on the first page. That's without very many backlinks at all. I'm curious about how it might perform now when I get it back up again.
I plan on self-hosting it this time. I have been playing around with Docker as a way to deploy a bunch of web-apps and I will use farrierservices.net as a test to see how things go with that.
This picture is of my old rig set up that I used for about 25 years of my career. - Its just for the nostalgia, like the old website.
and a picture of the new one... what a change.