Image by via CrunchBase

Back when I started this site, it was completely free. Built on Blogger, images hosted at photobucket, and email provided through a service that had just sprung up at AOL: My eAddress. At the time this was fantastic because I could pick an email for the site which was close to the domain that I would eventually purchase. It turned out that AOL was not going to give users access to the domain outside of emails, so I bought up a couple of domains anyway. Still ended up continuing to use the emails since the first hosting service I had was terrible and did not want to put emails there. A different host and a couple of blogging platforms later, the eAddress is no longer going to be around.

Today there was a lovely email in my inbox:

As of December 31, 2008, AOL will no longer maintain ownership of domain names registered through My eAddress. Before we release all registered names, however, we are offering our users the opportunity to take ownership of the domains themselves, while continuing to use the My eAddress service. You must take advantage of this offer before December 31, 2008 to avoid disruption to your email service.

So now its time to stop being lazy and then wait for the domains to go to back into gen-pop. Its too bad, those emails were handy for beta testing software and the spam that followed.