HN Explorer

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

3 points by dojitza1 ↗ HN
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.

18 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 56.1 ms ] thread
PaulHoule
You mean vs

   nobody.substack.com
   tool.medium.com

?
dojitza1
So you do say it's mainly about signaling your independence and profficiency?
PaulHoule
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.

dojitza1
So you say being a paying customer gives a higher guarantee that you won't be locked out of your domain and be forced to switch to a new one, potentially losing a good chunk of your readership. It makes sense, and thank you for your answer.

As for the signaling, I don't view it as something undesirable. It is an innate human need and we rely on it heavily. I was just wondering what people found useful in addition to it.

PaulHoule
Or worse yet having the neighborhood get gradually worse. What if they don’t kick you off but the ads get more sleazy, distracting, annoying? What if the sidebars are full of engaging clickbait that hurts people psychologically, socially, and poltically?

Ultimately you are complicit in that if you stay, but moving is hard, you wind up making excuses for yourself, your heart won’t really line up in your writing.

dojitza1
I see that you are a talking about free blogging platforms. I was more interested in the free hosting + domain solutions with your own web page design.
mcherm
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.

gregjor
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.
dojitza1
I am aware of this. I am interested to know what value people find in owning a domain.
gregjor
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.
dojitza1
Thank you for the followup.

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

gregjor
I own a few domains. I have one that I use for staging work and temporary DNS for customers who can’t change their DNS or set up a site quickly. I can also put my own wireframes and proofs of concept there. It’s separate from the domain name I use for the articles I publish.

For staging I use Digital Ocean, but I can point DNS to any server just to give it a name.

readonthegoapp
there are free domain registration and/or hosting providers?

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

dojitza1
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.
readonthegoapp
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
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
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.