I bought my first domain in 2020 and had absolutely no idea what came next.
I remember staring at the Hostinger dashboard thinking, okay, I’ve got a domain, now what. There was no plan. No roadmap. Just a vague sense that I wanted a website and a growing suspicion that I’d made a mistake.
Spoiler: I cancelled that domain about four months later.
And then I did the same thing again with the next one.
The pattern was pretty consistent. I’d get excited about an idea, buy the domain, poke around in WordPress for a bit, get overwhelmed, and then quietly let it expire while telling myself I’d figure it out properly next time. I think I cancelled three domains between 2020 and 2022. Each one felt like a small failure at the time.
What I didn’t realise was that every single one of those cancelled domains taught me something, even if it didn’t feel like it.
The first one I cancelled because I genuinely didn’t understand hosting. I thought buying a domain meant I had a website. It doesn’t. A domain is just the address. Hosting is the actual land the house sits on. Once I figured that out, everything started making a bit more sense.
The second one I cancelled because I panicked about the design. I spent so long trying to get the site to look right that I never actually put anything on it. A beautifully designed empty website is just an expensive placeholder. Nobody’s visiting it. Nobody’s reading it. It’s just sitting there looking tidy while doing nothing.
By the time I got to domain number three I was starting to understand the basics but I still didn’t have a clear enough reason for the site to exist. What was it for? Who was it for? I couldn’t answer those questions properly so I stalled, and stalling long enough eventually turns into cancellation.
I’ve been with Hostinger across all four of my current domains and I’ll be honest, the main reason I stuck with them is that the interface doesn’t make me feel stupid. That sounds like a low bar but when you’re starting out and everything feels foreign, a clean dashboard where you can actually find things without a tutorial is genuinely valuable. The pricing is straightforward, the WordPress setup is about as close to one-click as it actually gets, and the times I’ve needed support they’ve been responsive without making me feel like I was bothering them.
I’m not going to pretend it’s perfect. There are things I’ve had to Google that probably should be clearer in the documentation. But for someone who started out cancelling domains out of sheer confusion, having a host that doesn’t add to the overwhelm has been worth a lot.
If you’re at the stage I was in 2020, here’s the only advice I’d actually give: pick a host, pick a topic, and publish something ugly. The learning happens when you’re doing it, not when you’re planning to. I wasted about two years being almost ready. The domains I have now are the ones I stopped overthinking long enough to actually build something on.
If you want to start without the same fumbling around I did, Hostinger is where I’d point you. The link is here: Hostinger. That’s a referral link, just so you know.
Dewi