Holy smokes — I got my domain back after 13 years.
Recently, I was digging through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, strolling through bits of my digital past, when I noticed something unexpected: my old domain wasn’t being captured anymore. That sent me straight to the address bar… and the browser returned, “Site cannot be reached.” A quick WHOIS lookup later and—shockingly—the domain was available again.
I hadn’t really been using it much near the end anyway. From what I can tell, the last snapshot I still had control over was on March 5, 2013. The years leading up to the end of my marriage—and the whirlwind of life that followed—definitely played a role in things fading out. Even my second-life adventures as Dedric Mauriac slowed to silence after July 2011, likely thanks to the explosion of new social media platforms competing for everyone’s attention. The only reason those old pages survived at all is that the hosting was free.
Eventually, my account on lewismoten.com was suspended; the domain changed hands multiple times, and over the years, it hosted a rotating parade of oddities. At times, it was filled with questionable ads, random landing pages, or entire sites in Chinese and Japanese. Among the more memorable stops: a Chinese Huanya Entertainment App, a Japanese stamp site, Zhejiang Haijing New Materials Co., Ltd., and Shanghai Xuji Electric Co., Ltd. The final archived capture before everything went dark was October 4, 2024.
And then… silence.
So I did what any nostalgic geek with a stubborn sense of digital destiny would do: I bought my identity back. And not just for a year—I locked it in for the next decade. There was an option to register it for 100 years, but at $2,000, that sentimental premium felt a bit steep. Besides… will this site still be relevant when I’m 150 years old?
I also upgraded my WordPress plan to remove the ads, add more storage, and ensure the site has a stable future. Three years was the maximum hosting upgrade option, so it’s set comfortably for a while.
One of my favorite parts of this whole rediscovery journey? If you go back to the very first snapshot of lewismoten.com, you’ll find the first webcam image ever posted of me. It was taken with a little black-and-white webcam and weighed in at just under 1kb. Back in 2000, tiny websites mattered — bandwidth was precious, pages were lean, and we were just thrilled to be online.
So now my domain has come home. It’s been through suspension, strangers, corporations, foreign language relaunches, and a long digital wander. And here we are — reunited.
It feels like recovering a piece of my personal history.
Here’s to preserving old stories, building new ones, and keeping the lights on where it all began.