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Comment by gregjor | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I am aware of this. I am interested to know what value people find in owning a domain.

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.

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

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.

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