I am aware of this. I am interested to know what value people find in owning a domain.
Just to clarify, you use your personal blog domain to stage websites for customers? That is an interesting use case. It does project your brand, since you are on your own infrastrucuture (at least visually, you still probably use a hosting provider) instead of github/heraku/etc
For staging I use Digital Ocean, but I can point DNS to any server just to give it a name.