Why would you buy a ___domain per idea for learning to develop? Sure for production this is a given but for fiddling about with things unless you have a good reason to work remotely why would you?
Because ___domain names are cheap, and feeling like you are actually producing something that the world can see is a great source of motivation. You also run into problems when you deploy to a real ___domain that you never encounter if you're just noodling around with code on your local computer.
The risk of creating a bunch of toy programs on your local disk that you never show to anyone is that you avoid the hard parts. Accountability is a good thing, in programming and in homework.
