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Comment by anderspitman | Hacker News Reader

Came here to say this. Someone needs to make registering domain names less daunting. It shouldn't be any more difficult than having a phone number.

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How is domain registration more daunting than the process to get a phone number? I felt like I had to give a lot more info, time and money to my phone carrier than to Hover.

Exactly, it is not daunting and way easier than 20 years ago. We went a long way to improve the process.

I got like 5 of them and I don't even use them!!

I should have been more specific. Registering is indeed pretty easy. But using a domain is quite difficult without a lot of background knowledge. Everyone understands how phone numbers work well enough to use them, and there are lots of systems in place to walk you through the process whenever you need to change phones (or numbers), etc.

Connecting a domain name to a piece of software running on any of your devices should require nothing more than a quick OAuth flow to your domain provider to connect a tunnel to the application. You shouldn't need to understand DNS, TLS, HTTP, ports, ip addresses, NAT, CGNAT, etc in order to self-host simple programs like URL shorteners quickly and securely.

I don't think registration is any kind of barrier at all. I think I could go from "I want this domain" to "I own this domain" in less than 30 seconds, most of which is spent logging in with my 2FA code. It's the same process as buying something on Amazon. I can't imagine how that could be much easier. The difficulty is later in the process when you have to actually host something there.

For someone who's familiar with the process, sure.

You literally type in the domain on something like namecheap.com if it says available you click add to cart and click checkout. Familiarity with the process of buying something online is the only requisite. Everything after is the hard part.

And then it's just the small task of understanding DNS, TLS, HTTP, ip addresses, ports, VPS management, and security patches.

I can't say you need that to slap a domain on a site. Most good hosting services abstract that for you.

How would being able to get a domain name more easily make this problem go away? You would also need to have it point somewhere, and setup redirects if you are trying to link to places you don't own.

A domain name can go away just as easily, maybe more easily than a popular URL shortening service.

It can? I trust my $12/yr domain to stick around longer than a hypothetical $12/yr subscription to a SaaS link shortening service. The only exception I think is bit.ly who seem to have staying power because they're actively fighting spam and have B2B revenue.

buying the domain isn't the hard thing it's configuring it that non-technical people have the most issues with.

Registering domains is much less daunting than getting a phone number. Phone numbers also aren't persistent, and they go away all the time.

How does the ease of availability of domain names relate to url shortening?

Sorry, I was a little vague. The implication is that if you have your own domain you can host your own URL shortener, which will never be deprecated. But obviously there are a lot of other problems that need to be solved to make self-hosting things like this easier. That's what my personal side projects are currently focused on.

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