Why I stopped paying

I have been an on and off blogger for over a decade now. I have never pursued it professionally or religiously. I have always taken ownership of my own representation and in most cases paid for my personalised Online representation. I had my own custom name domain atifhussain.com for professional use and a blogging website icttoolbox.com. All registered and hosted privately by me through third-party suppliers.

I did that for over a decade and when I had started the total cost would not amount to more than £80 per annum. As the years went by I would see the cost slowly rise until last year it went to more than £200 a year. Not only was I paying for my domain name and privacy but also for unlimited hosting I also ended up paying for protection against cyber attacks and malware detection and website data protection. The list was getting longer and longer and so was the cost of maintenance and upkeep.

Since then I have replaced the personal website with about.com/atifhussain and my blogging website to icttoolbox.wordpress.com and medium.com/@icttoolbox. I have worked with WordPress since it started and was very easy to migrate data from one site to another. No more paying for a dot com website or malware detection or cyber attacks because all of that comes as standard. The data stays public for as long as, even if I stop writing. I still have the option of deleting the data if I wanted to do so. I had to compromise on the personalised link but considering most if not all traffic comes through other links it made very little difference.

My main aim for writing is to give back to the wider community at large for which I am very grateful for as I have learnt a lot from other writers and thinkers. Hopefully will mention a few in my coming posts.

I stopped paying because I didn’t have to and because I felt I was paying for something that should come as standard and not as an added extra.

Why pay when you can go free.

-ICT is not a single tool, but a whole toolbox – Use the right combination of tools to achieve the desired result-

Image: @ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paying_attention_to_detail_(455279239).jpg