29 May 2025 marked the first anniversary of helenchong.dev, the very first domain name I ever rented.
In mid-May, I was reminded that late May would also be the birthday of my first domain name, but unfortunately I forgot to celebrate the occasion on May 29. Fortunately, as a queer person, renting my first domain name shortly before the start of Pride Month also made the occasion meaningful to me, so as it is now June in my time zone as I am writing this, I was reminded of the anniversary of helenchong.dev again, and decided to write this post to finally celebrate the occasion.
When I set up and use helenchong.dev after placing an order for it on Porkbun last year, I used GitHub Pages to host this developer portfolio and blog website of mine. However, this website has changed hosts multiple times since then — first Hostinger's premium shared hosting plan in July 2024, then my first virtual private server (VPS) recently in May 2025, then a new VPS a week later to this day. This reflects another major benefit of a custom domain name for your website — allowing visitors to view your website without changing the website address even if you switch hosts for your website.
I am happy with my decision to choose helenchong.dev as my domain name for software development purposes — in addition to my developer portfolio and blog website, I have also created a subdomain git.helenchong.dev for my own Gitea instance, and am using helenchong.dev as the custom domain name of my email address. Therefore, even before approaching its anniversary, I had renewed helenchong.dev, and intend to make use of this domain name as long as I am able.
Furthermore, I am pleased to inform that Porkbun's service is indeed great, not only for their affordable pricing for domain names, but also for having great customer support, which I had positive experience with. If you are looking for a domain name registrar, I cannot recommend Porkbun enough.
Happy Birthday, helenchong.dev, and Happy Pride Month!