Nov 2020, the domain I had got unregistered and what you can see below is the loss in traffic.
After years of content creation and having curated an audience, I lost almost everything after a single change. Didn't renew the domain, and someone else took it over. Now this domain is being sold by someone for $2000.
Previously during the peak days, I was having monthly traffic of about 30k people which was converting to a revenue of about $1-$5 and sometimes even $20 per month as Adsense revenue. But once the domain was expired I had to shift my website to another URL which was kind of new in this already dense content creation arena. With all the backlinks lost I just didn't have any traffic. I lost the Adsense and any other benefits that I had from my blog. About 4 years of effort just went into the drain but I had the blog still with myself and I could host it anywhere else. The posts and articles that used to appear easily in a google post were no longer visible, Google had replaced them with other better versions it could find.
After reverting to the free version iecivil.blogspot.com I rarely get any traffic, daily about 1-4 visitors but I've seen a steady rise since I've started it again. Most of my friends say that it'll take another 2-3 years for it to be back with traffic as it had in the past and this time I shouldn't change the URL too often.
I knew that the domain is going to expire but at that point in time, I wasn't much interested in keeping any more reasons for which I shall be explaining later. If I wasn't going to keep the domain for a long time then I should have already kept a redirect on that every time someone came to my website they would automatically be redirected to the other URL which when people try to create a link would have been taken as the latest one.
People usually just copy-paste the website they find in the address bar, it would have been good to retain the last few back-links that I could have had.
Prelude-
I had been blogging since 2016, initially, it started as a free blogspot.com based blog and during the initial days I used to post about my college works, assignments that I worked on, or things that I did kind of invented.
A friend recommended that I make it a .com website so that people would find it more credible and you could also have a better ranking in the search. So I did buy a domain from GoDaddy and in the first year, it cost me just Rs. 99 to buy it. It was just the domain and no hosting or anything else.
I used that domain to point to my .blogspot.com website and used it as a redirect. Then I realized that the domain I selected was kind of difficult to understand so I bought another one from BigRock this time I also got free email IDs with it. I could create my own email addresses and the price was the same Rs. 99 I guess these companies were running some kind of advertising campaign at that point in time where we got the first time registration very cheap.
Now a year passed on, it was time to renew the domain, I renewed it once and it costed me about Rs. 1600. But since I was very excited by the entire idea of having an online presence I thought to let it be there. Then it stayed around for about 2 years until 2020. Yes, the pandemic had its effects on everyone and it made me think about the money being spent on such areas.
Lately, most browsers have started showing that the website was not secure and the pad-lock icon won't appear in the address bar. It was making it more difficult to digest that you have paid for a domain yet your website looks something shady. I tried looking out to resolve the pad-lock issue and the I could see that you need to have an SSL certificate which is another costly stuff that you need to buy. There are a few free alternatives that I tried but they didn't work out. I was getting more and more frustrated with it.
When you're having no revenue or benefit from something, it is better to give it up and that is what I had thought at that point in time. And I just didn't renew the domain when it was time.
Today-
The website is gradually gaining traffic, I have done the SEO again. Submitted the site maps to Google Webmaster console so that it could index the website again and get me the traffic back.
$2000 is too much for me to pay to get the domain back, but these day's I'm not falling behind from claiming that my website is worth $2000 (Rs. 147390.00 on 19th Sept 2020) at least. It is something I did for free in my free time and now someone is actually pricing it to a considerable amount. At least for most Indians, 1 lakh is a healthy sum.
I won't be putting this blog to a domain any sooner as it involves a lot of hassle to manage SSL and other stuff associated with it, for a passive blogger like me I guess .blogspot.com based blogs are good enough to work with.
Thanks for reading.