A Pain in the Whatchamacallit
By Tiny Ruisch
I’ve owned my domain name since May 10, 2001. No, this article isn’t going to be a long plug for my website. I’m going to try and convince you to register your own domain. I’ve long believed that everyone should have a presence on the internet. It’s kind of like having a phone number.
The biggest reason you should probably get a domain name is so that you can easily control your e-mail. If your e-mail address is YourName@suddenlink.net, you would lose it if you want to change your Internet Service Provider to AT&T or another company. It would be a real pain in the you know what to have to change your e-mail address with all of your contacts. For me, it would be even harder to have to make the change on all of the websites I’ve registered with.
If you had your own domain, you could have the e-mail address of YourName@yourdomain.com or .net, or .org, etc. You would keep that e-mail for as long as you owned the domain. Never again would you have to change your e-mail address.
Many people avoid those problems by registering their e-mail with Yahoo, Google, AOL, etc. One of the problems with this method is that you are often limited in your mailbox storage, size of attachments, composition tools, security, etc. Free e-mail also usually includes free advertisements.
Many computer users have a “junk” mail address. This is one that they only use for message boards, free offers or other sites that you don’t want to have your real e-mail. With your own domain, you control all your e-mail addresses. For example, I often create a one time address for sites. I usually make an e-mail like del0201@tinys-bs.com. This lets me know that I can delete the mail address on February 1. One more advantage to having your own e-mail control is that if you give an address to a specific place and all of a sudden you get spammed at that e-mail, you know who compromised you. You can then delete the address and never deal with them again.
Owning your domain isn’t expensive. For instance HostGator, the club’s web hosting service, charges $12.95 a year to register SWLAPCUG.org. Hosting services are $7.16 a month. If you sign up for three years, the rates drop to $12.98 and $3.96. If you do a web search you will find many companies and many different pricing plans.
For that low fee, you get unlimited e-mail addresses, disk space and bandwidth. There are several other hosting features that you may or may not want to use.
E-mail isn’t the only reason you might want to consider having your own domain. You can easily make a website to show off your hobbies, a family photo album, share recipes, or do like me: just plain BS.
Other things I’ve used my domain name(s) for is to give family members their own e-mail address, host private chat rooms, store files, etc.
That’s all of my thoughts for February. My mind is empty again. Thanks for reading.