11 p.m. Last night, I nearly handed over the wrong site
Last Thursday at 11 p.m., I was in Hangzhou updating a personal website for a freelance photographer. The domain was bought, the pages were ready, and I almost broke the way an existing client reached the site. An address that had always worked suddenly failed, leaving anyone who shared it on a blank page. I got stuck here too: I focused on whether the new pages looked good and never checked whether the old address would still work.
This time, the issue was a change to the grandfathering rules for .name domains. The website technology was fine, but some long-standing legacy domains may need to migrate under the new registration and renewal rules. Neil Fraser documented the change on his personal blog, and developers have discussed in the community which legacy domains are affected. This was not “the site must be rebuilt.” It was more like checking an address book: which links stay, which move, and whether the old address will work again afterward.
Today, reproducing this check costs 0 yuan and takes about 30 minutes. The technical barrier is not high, but I need to understand the domain status shown on the registrar’s page. First, I log in where I bought the domain and find “Domain List” or “Manage.” I do not rush to renew. Instead, I record every legacy address still in use, then search for “.name domain migration” or “domain retention rules.” If I use a forwarding service such as Cloudflare, I also check the redirects for the old addresses. If the site still works, I leave things alone for now instead of changing them randomly.
When I am just starting with one personal homepage, I spend 10 minutes listing every link I have shared publicly and delay migration. When I already have one or two clients, I test the old links one by one against the client list and preserve the existing redirects. When I am scaling and have several sites or subdomains, I ask a technical helper to build a complete inventory before choosing a coordinated migration. The mistake I am most likely to make is testing only the homepage on my computer, not the old link a client has kept in WeChat for three years.