Ask HN: Medium charges $75 for pointing the blog to my existing domain? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Medium charges $75 for pointing the blog to my existing domain?

12 pointssidcool29 comments

I was under the impression that Medium lets you point to a custom domain if you already own the domain. But I contacted support and they say that a one time $75 payment is mandatory.

Same goes for Wordpress. They charge $99 per year even if you own a domain. Is this something common? I have talked to people who say they use these features for free, as the domain is already owned. Any ideas?

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Hey, I have two Medium blogs that point to my custom domain. They didn't charge me any money, and in fact the Support guy went above and beyond to help me the issues I was having with my domain name provider. But, I see now they are charging $75 for it and I'm a bit taken back.

If all you need is a blog, might I suggest Tumblr? They (as long as I remember) don't charge you a thing. You won't get an SSL certificate though.

Yes, it's extremely common. Pay to have your own domain and remove the wordpress/medium branding.

In spite of the fact that I already own and have paid for the domain with Namecheap?

Yes. You want to use your own domain and brand, you pay for it.

You're not paying the 75 dollars for the domain, you're paying it for Medium allowing you to use it. What's surprising you there? It's just another type of user segmentation.

Think of it as a one-time license fee to white label the Medium tech. Pretty cheap, imo. Surprised they didn't make it a recurring fee, tbh.

Out of curiosity, what benefit do you see getting from having the content be on your own domain vs. Medium itself?

It's probably just me being quirky, but when I'm reading a Medium article on someone's custom domain, I get slightly annoyed that it's a little harder to get back to Medium itself to get to the rest of my reading list.

If you decide against paying the fee, I doubt I'm alone in saying that I don't judge the content itself on whether it's on medium.com vs. randomtechguymusings.*.

Publish good, thoughtful, valuable content and your work will speak for itself regardless of domain name.

It's fun you'd say that because there are quite a few discussion on HN saying they don't read medium.com domains anymore. The articles are too low quality.

They are elitists, or they think they are :) and trying how far they can go. And people here adore them.

Not sure what the case is with Medium but with Wordpress you are better off hosting it yourself so you have full control of everything.

$99 a year seems excessive but, I guess, for those uncomfortable with self-hosting it may be worth it?

I wouldn't recommend running your own WordPress unless you're willing to update plugins on a moment's notice. Lots of plugins have security holes and once an exploit is in the wild, mass hacks of WordPress blogs are very common. If WordPress hosts it for you, they will close the holes much faster than you can.

It's quite easy to install a plugin that will auto-update all of your plugins for you, and WordPress itself auto-updates by default now.

$99 a year (<$10 pcm) for someone else to handle my problems doesn't seem that much if the service for which I'm paying is important to me. Sure, I can self host things, but I've learnt pretty quickly the the extra pain in keeping things up to date, and maintaining them in general is simply not worth my time.

If you are looking at custom domain + self-hosting, I suggest looking into cloudron.io. They have wordpress as an app (but I recommend looking into Ghost as well).

I was just trying out WordPress.com's personal plan, it was only 36$ a year for hosting and pointing my domain (which is I registered on Namecheap).

Does it come with SSL?

Yup builtin in SSL.

BTW I cancelled the plan because they didn't let me customize permalinks. I was moving an existing blog to WordPress.com, so it was important to preserve links structure.

Why not just 301?

There is no way to upload your own .htaccess file on WordPress.com. I didn't really look deep enough into it. The most of info about setting up redirects were for self-hosted WordPress.

But I gave up quickly because self-hosted blogs are working fine. (And there really isn't that much extra work in keeping those blogs secure and up to date.)

oh duh, I didn't consider that. I've had similar problems on squarespace with no way to edit the robots.txt file.

They don't charge you for the domain itself but for some part of their service. What's so hard to get about this?

Tumblr on custom domain is free, I think.

This post was removed by mods. It's cool. I got my answers. Thanks everyone.

I think doing so on Heroku was costly as well.

It's actually a relatively difficult thing to bolt on to some apps, their custom domain setup is not very easy.

(shameless plug)

We let you put custom hostnames + ssl in front of hosted apps, we have a really early attempt at a medium one in progress. If you'd like to try it, send me an email at kurt@fly.io

(/shameless plug)

You may own the domain, but you still have to find some way to store the files and serve the necessary bandwidth. That's why you have to pay extra. However, $75 or $99 is excessive. Hostgator charges less than 3 bucks a month, you'd be much better off with a small shared hosting like that.

um... medium hosts the files and handles the necessary bandwidth already. Adding a custom domain doesn't change that at all. I don't disagree that you'd be better off with other sites but those are NOT the reasons it costs $75

There's loss of control when medium isn't the apex domain anymore. For instance, users are less likely to see other medium stories because of how segmented you are. I don't see an issue with a one time fee for these reasons.

I think custom domains are a tool for price segmentation* (like a student discount). Medium and Wordpress want offer a free product (for marketing/network effects), but also have their higher-end users pay. They do that by limiting a few features their higher-end users need to the premium product to force them to buy. In this case, it's custom domain that lets you look more professional.

You see this with email too. Want to use your own domain and look like a real business (vs. some dude with small-time aspirational business-hobby run off of gmail)? Then you pay $5 a month or spend your time being a sysadmin.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination

>Hostgator charges less than 3 bucks a month

$75 is a one time charge. Admittedly, OP is unlikely to maintain a blog for 3 years and Medium is even more unlikely to be around in 2020 but $75 one time sounds better to me than $3/month forever.

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