The importance of having a personal domain name | Hacker News Reader

The importance of having a personal domain name

johnathannader.com

60 pointsnadermx77 comments

I agree with this 100% but you should also see the confusion among non-technical people when my spouse gives them her firstname@lastname.com email address (a totally valid inbox on a server that I run, I run our own authoritative DNS and choose where to set the MX, etc).

She works in a non-technical field and some percentage of people simply can't grasp the concept that an ordinary person owns their family name as a domain name.

I have run into this issue too. My Gmail account was challenging to say over the phone/in person and I wanted a platform agnostic email address so I grabbed firstlast.co but it often takes some reassurance that yes, that is my real email address.

part of your problem might be with the .co , since outside of tech industry circles or people who are actually Colombian, it's rare and weird. I bet you'd halve the problem or more if it was a .net or similar.

.co is actually fine usually as people in Australia are familiar with .co.uk and .co.nz (even though the “co” means different things in those contexts)

I share a name with a US Governor which is great for keeping my teenage internet activity buried in search results but made it tricky to find a suitable domain name.

I own osdev.(com|net|org) and I've experimented with using different email addresses over many years. The .net and .org TLDs still cause a lot of confusion. I'd guess that .edu is questioned the least after .com. But even .com addresses from non-common domains cause people to question them.

wildrabbitmonkey1971z@gmail.com - no problem. matt@osdev.com - I'm sorry, can you repeat that for the forth time?

I've experimented with other domains using common English words and its no better.

I still like to use a personal domain to register with most sites but if I have to give someone an email address over the phone its going to be a common email hosting service that forwards to my real email.

I made the mistake of having a domain hack with my last name for my personal address, really hard to explain to people and it'd be too annoying to move away from now.

I feel you. I have a two letter domain and constantly have to explain that “Yes, that’s it.” when they want to add an extra .com on the end.

if you own a two letter .com or .net or something, and not some new gTLD, you should probably sell it for a fat stack of cash... unless you have a very compelling use for it.

I suspect they meant the .<gg|in|co> part is two letter.

Are you saying you own your own tld?

I think they're saying they own a two letter domain , which if it's a .com is probably worth enough money to sell, put into a S&P 500 index fund, and retire.

https://dofo.com/blog/two-letter-com-domain-names/

If it's a two letter domain at some new esoteric recently created gTLD, quite a lot less.

Since they said they drop the .com after, the only thing I could think of is that they gave a top level domain and can just mail directly to it. For example alex@arpa

See: https://serverfault.com/questions/721927/can-you-have-an-ema...

People have emailed me at first@last.net (& I got it), & saw the other addresses, which was first@last.net.gmail.com

The second letter in my first name is an 'a', the last 3 letters of my last name are 'ski'. When the .ski domain finally became available for general use, I jumped to register [last 3 of first name][first 7 of last name].ski so I could have [1st]@(for the 'a')[middle part].ski. It looked cool as hell to me but confusing as hell to anyone else and it was impossible to verbally communicate.

same, it's better than a business card, especially among tech circles

"just email me at 'my name at my last name but dot ski'"

super memorable and shows you know your way around the stack :)

I have a gmail account that I grabbed when I worked at Google that reads very fake. It might as well be spam@ (it's not). Geeks love it. Normal people think I'm lying. (Geeks think I'm lying too but I can prove it, so they quickly more to the loving it phase.) I often get replies from support teams quickly because they want to see if it's fake.

Let me guess: root?

postmaster? admin?

email@gmail?

Do you have issues with spam filters blocking your emails? I've heard that any non `.com` email is a mess from a deliverability perspective.

I think the biggest issue is signing up to websites. I support a .org.au domain and get occasional complaints people can't use online services that declare it to not be a valid tld.

I use @pm.me (Protonmail’s domain) and I’ve had a couple of instances where emails I send bounce or email systems of certain corps won’t deliver to me. It’s pretty rare but it happens maybe once a year or so. Notably the web server of the government of the city I live in (Austin, TX) won’t accept emails from that domain so I have to use my Gmail to communicate with them.

My first name ends in 'in'. So, I registered <2-(n-2) letters of first name>.in, giving me an email address of the form a@bcdef.in. If you remove the '@' and the '.', you just get my first name.

I thought I was being clever at the time, but nobody gets it. Sigh.

Did you have delivery issues to Western email addresses, given the .in origin of your mail?

I also use a .in in the US and the only delivery issues I have is when trying to give someone my email address over the phone.

That said, I probably receive >>100x as many emails as I send so I'm not sure I can really say I've tested sending emails particularly thoroughly.

Not OP, but Discover bank Zelle signup refused to believe that an email can end in .in. It accepted happily an email ending in .us.

I have not observed any delivery issues yet, but I seldom use the .in address.

I did something similar but used the @ as an A in my name

I have my own one: *.tel (my name is *tel). My email is *@*.tel; lots of people get it. Life is good.

I have my own with an 'hn' domain, with the @ replacing the 'a' in my first name. Usually non-technical people gets it and they find it amusing.

Something like d@r.io?

For a brief amount of time, I did a similar thing and hosted my personal website on the domain that spelled my full name using the .si TLD after finding a registrar that let me buy one (turns out that `.si` is the country prefix for Slovenia, and I guess they let people from outside the country buy their domains). It was a bit more expensive than a .com domain, but still reasonable (I think in the $20-25 range), but I didn't end up renewing it after even many of my classmates in the computer science program at my college seemed to be confused by it.

I had exactly the same experience with a .name domain two decades ago. You'll explain every single time you mention it.

And I thought short domains are cool and abbreviated the name to 3 letters. Today I only communicate the full <first>@<last>.name.

I learned a lot about slooowly migrating names along the way.

Even worse if you use this domain as a way to track (and block) incoming e-mails. People at <FOO LTD> often have a hard time accepting that e-mail might actually be <foo>@<my name>.

Tried this in person once when signing up to the companies club or a discount. Once.

I do this all the time, albeit with a qmail x-foo@ alias, and just straight up own it - "I sort my email so I can tell who sells my address". I've never really had a problem.

Once tried to explain to Rapid7 (a security company no less) they had leaked/sold my email address, as per the system you describe.

Couldn't get through to anyone that understood.

Ha yes, I get some inquisitive looks. I usually preface by saying, “This will sound strange, but I use a different email address with every company I interact with. So, it will be <foo>@…”

I initially set up my email on my domain as me@mydomain.com. I don't really remember why, but it was a really stupid idea as it's so hard to explain to people. "It's me at mydomainname.com. Well, no, not my first name, it's emmm eee at..."

Same. I have now switched to "hey" and it works much better. The part that trips a lot of people (and some really bad email validators out there) up is that my TLD is .gg which is still pretty uncommon. Most of the times I get asked if I'm sure I didn't mean "hey@vlad.gr" or "hey@vlad.gov".

I generally use `mail@` for whenever I want something generic, and otherwise use some suitable prefix for whatever service I'm using. I've been surprised and pleased that whenever I have to end up talking to a human on the phone for something, telling them my email is <their service name>@<my domain> doesn't seem to faze them.

I use the same system! So far so good; I have had a couple of occasions where someone seemed to be momentarily taken aback, but it's never been a real problem.

I seemed to do ok in that respect with me@firstnamelastname.com, except that both my first and last names are often enough misspelled that I gave up and give out one of my other domains for email now.

Just tell them firstname@... and redirect it. I own my domain and apart from my partner and kids emails I get everything else redirected to my personal address. A surprising amount of spam is emailed to sales@... and admin@...

My email is first@last.name. The ".name" domain is oddly underused and often throws people for a loop.

I think the vast majority of people don't recognize 98% of the new/novel gTLDs when they see them.

Using an arbitrarily chosen noun:

If I have a taco truck and I put in giant font on the side

BURRITO.NET

BURRITO.COM

People will immediately get that it's a website.

If I put BURRITO.NAME on it, very few will.

For the opposite of a lot of these, I use first@firstlast.com and nobody has any trouble with that. I usually get a little sideways glance since I didn’t say a work place or gmail, but they rarely ask me to clarify.

My mother made all her calls from a public phone box (Rural Bavaria in the 80s).

Having your own phone number was as unusual then as a domain might be for some today.

Spread the word and show it!

My friend named Dot wanted dot@dot.com. Couldn't get that...

A hotel chain manager was adamant that my first@last.net was missing gmail.com or yahoo.com or hotmail.com. I pointed out that his official email his F.Last@hotel.cctld has no .com or gmail yahoo. He said, oh its corporate, its allowed. Not allowed for persons. I was speechless.

I would take some private delight in messing with such a person by instructing them to use <gmail@myname.com>.

My last name is "to" and my first name has a non-standard spelling, so I managed to get me@firstname.to

Communication of it isn't too bad. I usually say "the word me at {first name}.to, spelled the same way as my name" (since oftentimes they ask for my name first). Other times I literally just spell it out.

Do you use a service to handle spam and a GUI interface?

Look, I'll say this as an admitted domain hoarder myself, but:

The thing that sucks about namespaces is that there's no way to win. If people can own them without an ongoing cost, they'll go unused (think of people squatting really good social media usernames without activity on the account). If people have to pay an ongoing cost, there will be a lot of stuff where the cost-benefit to them of maintaining the domain part of those [Cool URIs] they picked doesn't make sense... so a lot of cool stuff has disappeared from the internet, especially the personal or non-commercial freely shared resources, leaving an ad-ridden wasteland behind.

So yeah, I do kinda think that people should have their own domains if they have enough internet presence to want to set up a Linktree, but way too many techie people take the drawbacks for granted.

[Cool URIs]: https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html is the link everyone knows, but https://remysharp.com/2016/12/22/cool-uris-dont-change is the better one

I've tried for years to get one that use to be in use as an automotive model fan site. Hasn't been updated in years, last copyright info says 2002. Online services say it may generate <$100/year in ad fees. Tried to contact the owner using every way imaginably. Never got a reply.

If you know of a domain registrar that will not respond to frivolous DMCA requests, I'm all ears. Unfortunately, DMCA is being abused and registrars will continue forcefully removing you off their platforms, even if the DMCA request has no merit.

This is the biggest problem (and yes, I know one can make a .onion website, but I would like to stay on the mainnet).

I would guess njal.la, founded by Peter Sunde of the Pirate Bay [1], would not respond to frivolous DMCA requests.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sunde

Personally, the main reasons I have my own domain name started for "fun" but has really become more about how much having an email address is required for everything in my life. If I was using an email address that depended on being Google's good graces and that suddenly got shut off, I wouldn't be able to do anything.

At least by owning the domain, I can still use GMail as my mail provider, but if something goes wrong there, I can update MX records and continue to receive my email.

I wish that some reputable, long-lived service (like the Internet Archive) would offer free subdomains that users could set DNS records for and point to anything. Alternately, one of the TLD could provide free, low-value domains, like 2039483953-Alice-Bobson.com. Domain names are cheap, but there are a lot of people (e.g. teenagers) out there who are averse to spending money on anything. They end up posting under *.blogspot.com or whatever, which permanently ties them to a particular host and content management system unless they break any links to their content.

https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/PersistentDomains.html

> For example, let us create a series of top-level persistent domains y2000, y2001 and so on. One would only be able to acquire a .y2000 domain name during the year 2000. Once acquired one would have it forever.

There is hardly any content here. How did it get to the front page. I have noticed a trend where new sites with mediocre blog content content acting as resumes, get to the front page. The resume blog concept is stale and overdone imho.

Disagree with the message of the post. No one is impressed by personal domain names. No one cares about your branding. People only care about the content. And unless you are on the ball regarding payments, you domain and or hosting will lapse sooner than you expect and all your content gone. At least with facebook or substack you do not have to worry about that.

I own lastnamelaw.com (I am a lawyer).

Another lawyer with the same last name owns: lastnamelaw.net

I get email addressed to that firm almost on a daily basis-- even as "responses" to the firm.

I have first.last@Gmail.

My first and last are not super common, but not unusual either.

I get tons of emails for other people sharing my name. Most recently a teacher emailed me a detailed educational plan for a student. I've had doctor appointment reminders, collegiate coaches trying to set up scrimmages, and countless account verification emails, among others.

I have <mylastname>.com. I get so many emails intended for people sharing my last name. They think they can just register on a site with theirfirstname@mylastname.com and it will magically work.

I am always mystified by such emails. Does the addressee think they will receive messages automatically? Or does the sender think everybody has an email in their name? Very curious...

I assume this happens just as the result of honest mis-hearings, mis-rememberings, or mis-transcriptions.

"What's your email?"

"first.last9@gmail.com"

"Got it" (writes down first.last@gmail.com).

Your name must be more common than my name... i have first.last@gmail.com since the invite-only gmail beta. Not a single misdirected email to me.

I agree with the OP's point. If you work in tech then having your own domain tells me you understand at least a little of how the internet works.

I notice email domains on resumes. You get bonus points if you list an email from a custom domain on your resume.

I don't look kindly on developer resumes that have emails from aol.com, hotmail.com, yahoo.com etc. The last one indicates that you probably don't care about security.

Isn't this prejudice?

I mean, you're not giving every developer a fair chance to show their true value. The e-mail provider has nothing to do with their technical skills. Or can you objectively demonstrate such causal relation or at least a statistically relevant correlation?

Look man, just ditch the yahoo email already.

I don't use Yahoo and think it's a terrible e-mail service, but I wouldn't prejudge a candidate based solely on that.

I definitely agree with the point but I’d say that people who own domains and websites should connect their webpages into webindie’s things as much as possible (imo) because in the ages of social media a website feels like something alone and “screaming into the void” place. Also I was thinking about how to share my domain address to the people in real life if they ask my contact and I figure it out to make business cards with QR code that leads to my website.

The (mis)use. Of periods. and commas, in that, article. Was. Very, annoying.

I agree; I went ahead and read up on writing after this post garnered attention. My next post I feel will be better grammatically. Thanks for the kind way to get your point across.

That article reads like it was written in another language and then converted to English with translation software from 2003.

Some of the other pages on the site are in French, so perhaps the author's first language is French.

English was in fact not my first language; I went ahead and brushed up on my grammar after people rightly pointed out how bad my writing style was. I edited the post to fix the grammar issues, although, I feel even in it's bad form, it still got the point across; which is accomplishment in itself.

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