personal-domain

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A personal domain is a domain name that you personally own, control, and use to represent yourself on the internet. Getting a personal domain is the first step towards getting on the indieweb, and is therefore a requirement for IndieMark Level 1.

How

• Get your own personal domain name - Ask a friend or colleague for a domain name registrar that they use and like/trust/respect etc.
• Domain Privacy - Note that most domain name registrars will make your personal information (name, mailing address, phone number and email address) publicly available via whois lookups. Some registrars offer domain privacy options, so that instead of your personal details the registrar's details will be in the whois directory. Only use domain privacy if you fully trust the provider of the service -- disputes about domain name administration or transfers may get tricky if you are not listed as the legal owner of the domain.

Domain Registrars

A domain name registrar is an organization that will register domain names for you typically for an annual fee.

Considerations

• Configurability - You should be able to set up all record types (A, CNAME, MX, TXT) for as many subdomains as you'd like/need.
• Email forwarding - does the registrar offer free email forwarding? This is useful if you want an @yourdomain.com email address that forwards to an existing account.
• Auto-renew - it's easy to accidentally let a domain name registration expire; some registrars let you set up email reminders or an automatic renewal to prevent this from happening.
• Domain Privacy - Note that most domain name registrars will make your personal information (name, mailing address, phone number and email address) publicly available via whois lookups. Some registrars offer domain privacy options, so that instead of your personal details the registrar's details will be in the whois directory. Only use domain privacy if you fully trust the provider of the service -- disputes about domain name administration or transfers may get tricky if you are not listed as the legal owner of the domain.
• Bundled hosting? Shop around for the best registrar and best host for your needs. They do not need to be the same.

Opinions/Recommendations

• Gandi.net
  • Used and recommended by rascul and Hans Gerwitz.
  • Simple UI, great service, ethical European company,
• Hover
  • Used and recommended by Eddie Hinkle and Bear
  • Free Whois Privacy, Good UX, Doesn’t try to trick you into services.
• NameCheap
  • Used and Recommended by Aaron Parecki and Kartik Prabhu.
  • Free Whois Privacy

Why

Why? All the reasons listed in why. This is the key first step to joining the indieweb.

Examples of domains being used IRL for disambiguation

Two employees at http://corp.oz.com/ were both called Sveinbjörn — one held sveinbjorn.is, the other sveinbjörn.org. A common company practise was to reply to “where’s Sveinbjörn?” with “dot is or dot org?”

— Brian Suda

See Also

• Getting Started
• short-domains
• DNS
• hosting
• IndieMark
• account
• multi-site indieweb
• https://medium.com/@ramshackleglam/hackers-stole-my-website-and-i-pulled-off-a-30-000-sting-operation-to-get-it-back-143d43ee3742
• 2017-03-17 EFF: If the Government Can't Get Domain Seizures Right, Why Would Big Pharma Do Better?
• Criticism of alternatives:

  Aaron Parecki: a big problem with the other promises of "use X so you don't have to register a domain name" is that quite often X involves a lot more work/time/money