Today makes the beginning of a slow transition over to a new domain name: TKelly.org. Over the course of the past couple years, I’ve grown fond of the .me domain[1] and it has served my needs well. But as fate would have it, it’s time for a change.
My hosting service, the company that manages the domain name and web servers, has been 1and1 through a half a dozen websites over the last decade or so. From my first site, computertom.ws, to my most recent, 1and1 had always done an excellent job hosting my websites but were disappointing me in other ways. If you check out their homepage (here) you’ll quickly notice how commercialized and 90’s-flashy their website is. Worst of all, once you have a paying account and logged in, that commercial aspect doesn’t fall back the way you’d expect it to. To give an analogy, you know those paywalls that most newspapers are now using that let you read a few articles for free before stopping you? Now imagine if you were still bombarded by those as a subscriber. That’s what 1and1’s website feels like. Besides being annoying, it was also a waste of my time. 
But I was still willing to put up with their terrible customer experience since, as I said, they did their job of hosting just fine. What made me switch was their incompetent customer service combined with my realization of an opportunity.
Once I came to terms with the fact that it might be time to switch to a new provider I quickly discovered Green Geeks, a hosting service committed to using renewable energy. In a market where every package cost about the same (i.e. a flat market), I’d much rather give my money to a eco-friendly company than any others. As a corollary of switching to Green Geeks, I also had to register a new domain since they don’t handle .me TLDs and instead focus on the usual .com, .org, .net, etc.
And voila, Tkelly.org was born.
The switch will take some time since there are a lot of references to tkelly.me that I’ll need to track down and attempt to update. I’ll also have to see if the new host is all that I hope it to be, but only time will tell.
- The ending on a website is technically called the Top Level Domain, or TLD.