Ask HN: Why do you use paid domains for personal blogs?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28064915

by dojitza1 • 5 years ago

3 18 5 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

With myriad of free-domain hosting providers, why pay for your own? Is there anything to it other than proficiency signaling and the feeling of control/independance? Would appreciate your feedback.

PaulHoule3• 5 years ago

You mean vs

   nobody.substack.com
   tool.medium.com

?

dojitza17• 5 years ago

So you do say it's mainly about signaling your independence and profficiency?

PaulHoule3• 5 years ago

The independence is real. What if substack or medium ends the free ride?

I would ask ‘what are you signaling if you don’t get your own domain?’

If it is signaling that you can’t afford $10 a year you are signaling cheapness which is not an appealing or desirable attribute.

Medium at first used the power of branding to insinuate it was a place that was a little better than other blogs. Gradually it became known as something that is a little worse.

I remember talking to some guy who was amazed that he’d gotten 78 views on an article and I didn’t have the heart to break it to him that it would take more like 250,000 views to impress me.

You know the ‘eternal september’? Like it or not some people work a lot harder than other people (how does Casanova bed so many women?) or are a lot smarter or have much more interesting insights.

Being on Medium or LinkedIn or other sites lowers people’s perception of you because you get linked to particular styles of discourse that come across as disingenous even when you are sincere.

mcherm• 5 years ago

I host my personal blog on https://www.mcherm.com because to me it's worth a few dollars every few years for domain registration plus a few cents a month (I don't get much traffic) for AWS hosting in order to make it clear that the site is fully owned by me and not be dependent on someone else (like medium) who may have their own agenda.

Self-hosted is really cheap. So I guess it IS the proficiency signaling and the independence... but for me, those are well worth the cost.

dojitza17• 5 years ago

Thank you for your answer.

gregjor3• 5 years ago

Hosting and domain registration are separate things. You can own a personal domain name (a few dollars a year) but use that for hosting pages for free on any number of sites. GitHub allows custom domains on GitHub Pages, for example. Or WordPress.com. You can add a custom domain to GMail too. Or you can pay a few dollars a month for a cloud web server and host your own site.

dojitza17• 5 years ago

I am aware of this. I am interested to know what value people find in owning a domain.

gregjor3• 5 years ago

Control and branding, mainly. In my own business I frequently need to stage sites for customers who either don’t control their DNS or have to go through corporate IT or some other process to set up a subdomain. I can add a subdomain to one of the domains I own in a few minutes because I own and control it. That keeps the project moving and shows the customer I can remove obstacles. Subdomains and DNS may not seem like major obstacles but with many companies just asking for a DNS change is a days or weeks long hassle.

readonthegoapp2• 5 years ago

there are free domain registration and/or hosting providers?

free as in....what's the catch?

dojitza17• 5 years ago

Limited traffic / static pages only / free advertising for other products that bring in revenue. Do you think there are more insidious 'catches'? I am struggling to come up with one.

readonthegoapp2• 5 years ago

i guess i would not have thought someone would have referred to such a service as 'free' -- at least, among the HN crowd.

but yeah, that makes sense.

p.s. i used HN Replies to see this comment. https://www.hnreplies.com/

tomjen3• 5 years ago

If you own your domain, you have the option of choosing any hosing you want. If you don't you are hold hostage to the platform you choose. That is not the feeling of control, that is the actual control.

10 usd/year is a rounding error. Get your own domain or get screwed over.

tjr• 5 years ago

I once had (and was happy with) a blog at blogs.mit.edu. Then MIT shut that whole server down, and all of the blogs there were destroyed.

I later started a free blog at Posterous. Posterous was bought by Twitter. The content was moved (free of charge) to Posthaven, while the original Posterous site was taken down.

Posthaven appears to have good intentions of being reasonably priced and available indefinitely, but even so, after having already lost some blogs to the whims of organizations outside my control, I think having my own domain name and my own hosting is worthwhile.

Ask HN: Why do you use paid domains for personal blogs?

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