When you are a WordPress.com customer! It took me a few years to figure out what was going on. I’d started a blog in December one year, and the next thing I knew, I was renewing the $26 annual fee in August! I was thinking, “How does that work?”

Being a veritable mathematics genius, I knew 12 months equaled 1 year. Which is another way of saying annual. WordPress did this forced renewal at 11 months! Taking a month off an annual fee gives corporate profits a nice 8.33 % boost! Not bad….

Then they took away the option of renewing manually say at 11 months 27 days (a couple a days for cushion not to lose your domain name), and instituted an “auto renewal” system. Which locked you into the 11 month thing.

Which is a long way to say that is why this domain changed from Iowalife.org to IowaLifedotorg.wordpress.com , the “free side”. I would have been happy to pay $26 dollars a year for my own domain name, but I’ll be damned if I’ll pay a “yearly” fee every 11 months.