A Pain in the Whatchamacallit
By Tiny Ruisch
I purchased my first internet domain name on May 10, 2001. For several years before that, I had a personal website that I hosted on the AOL free server. Fast forward to 2018 and I’m the owner of a dozen different domain names. (I’m counting the club websites which I lease to the SWLAPCUG at cost).
I think that everyone should get their own domain for a variety of reasons. The biggest reason 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 ever changed your Internet Service Provider to AT&T or another company. 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. Not only that, you could have many e-mail addresses. I usually create a new address for different sites. If I get a lot of spam, I know who sold my e-mail address.
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 rate drops to $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 sites that offer similar pricing.
Once you’ve purchased the service, you can easily make a website to show off your hobbies, a family photo album, share recipes. Other uses for personal domains and websites are to give family members their own e-mail address, host private chat rooms, backup files, etc.
You could also do like me: plain old fashioned BS.
Although it is helpful, there is really no reason to know HTML coding. There are several free programs that can have your personal website up and running in just a few hours. Most hosting companies offer easy installation of these applications. Web searches will find you many more.
The club website is powered by open sourced bulletin board software. On my personal site I use several free programs: RV Web Site Builder, WordPress, Blue Griffon, to name just a few. My point is that if you can use a word processor, you can use website software.
I sure hope I’ll be checking out some new websites in the near future. After all, if I can create a website, anyone can.
Thanks for reading.