From .io to .com: Calling My Shot!

Back in June 2022, I decided to dive into building my own personal website. What started as a simple idea quickly spiraled into a rabbit hole I didn’t even know existed. Suddenly, I was staring at a buffet of static site generators—Hugo, Jekyll, Eleventy, Gatsby, MkDocs, Hexo—you name it. After some trial and error, I landed on the one that felt right, spun it up on an Azure Static Web App with GitHub, and locked in my first domain: iancarey.io. Just like that, this site was born.

After a few blog posts, countless basketball games, plenty of golf, a new Mac, and migrating the site to AWS Amplify with a fresh CI/CD pipeline, I found myself in 2025 wondering where to take it next. That’s when a friend mentioned that the UK was planning to transfer sovereignty of the Chagos Islands (formerly the British Indian Ocean Territory) to Mauritius.

At first, it sounded like one of those headlines I’d usually scroll right past. But here’s the catch: the .io extension, despite being synonymous with tech, is actually a ccTLD (country code top-level domain), like .us or .ca. And when territories change hands, those domains usually get phased out over 5–10 years.

Luckily, given how popular .io has become, the more likely outcome is that it’ll be reclassified and continue on as a gTLD.

Still, I didn’t want to gamble with my online home. So, I did what any reasonable person would do—I went out and bought the .com version of my name. Because let’s be honest: .com is still where it’s at.

That purchase was… an experience. It was the first time I’d ever bought a domain directly from someone else. I used domainagents.com to handle the negotiation and escrow.com to safely manage the payment and transfer. The process itself was smooth—but negotiating for my own name? That was the painful part. Well, that and actually paying for it!

And with that, the new iancarey.com was born. In my next post, I’ll dive into the history of the domain itself! Until then—keep calling your shots.