[flagged]
Paying an amount that is just-above-market-rate for a domain and not needing to understand how to configure DNS for someone non-technical seems like an absolutely worth-while reseller case.
Your domain and how people reach you is probably the first lever. If you are giving that up happily, I assume renting without the option to own or leasing a car is a sensible business model to you and you are just experimenting without any real intention of starting.
The effort and time in becoming an artist outweighs by at least two or three orders of magnitude the time it would take to read an article and setup a domain. Namecheap, GoDaddy, all these registrar's do it for you.
Imagine having 900 houses and renting them out to a community of like minded folks. Whether it is at cost or slightly above, it is "rent seeking" in the sense they own, you borrow.
While it isn't rented, they are squatting on it.
It is, I feel, the responsibility of those who do know how these things work (e.g. us) to point out which things are important and which are safely dumped onto someone else. In this case, one’s identity on the ’net is very important, and something one should absolutely not put into position to be held for ransom later by being bundled with other services.
Do rent a hosting service, absolutely. (Do not trust it to hold the only copy of your data or metadata or social graph, but that’s usually something photographers understand implicitly, unlike e.g. writers.) Website hosting, DNS hosting, autoupload, social crossposts, whatever, buy all of that stuff as a bundle if you want—your risk threshold for redoing all of that after a hostile acquisition of your hoster is your own. But do not, under any circumstances, let them hold your identity at the same time. On the ’net, that’s your domain registration.
I've never ran into such brigading on HN before. I really thought I said something non-confrontational at first.
Wait till they get hit with their first domain renewal sniping attack. Then it's spiderman-pointy-finger meme all day when explaining who hurt who.
You own the domain. You can take it and they can't withhold it.
The registrar is already doing what this site is doing. I don't have a problem with a site making it easy to setup. It's the site holding a thousand website domains.
What you are asking for is different.
If FolioHD said:
Have a domain in mind that you'd like to use? Type it here and we'll do all the work setting that up.
What they are actually doing is:
We've bought these 900~ domains and we are holding them. Pick one you'd like and we'll set it up.
They’re not reselling or licensing out domains.
If the customer left it behind they could send it to the wayside.
If they are merely a broker then I agree, I don't see them as rent-seeking. The article left me with the impression that they had a large number of domains they rent out to customers.
Whether it is at cost or slightly above, it is "rent seeking" in the sense they own, you borrow.
While it isn't rented, they are squatting on it.
> "Rent seeking: the fact or practice of manipulating public policy or economic conditions as a strategy for increasing profits."
A simple test:
Would all of FolioHD's domains being rented benefit their business or not?
They are subsidizing the cost of buying those 900 domains into their overall pricing as a line item.
Now the registrar is trying to push out squatters. Sounds like the housing and renting markets. Insert surprise Pikachu face.
They buy 900 domains. They hold 900 domains.
Anyone who wants that domain cannot use it but must rent through them (whom they rent through someone else)
This is textbook rent seeking behavior.
It's same as any other domain registrar, except that have small markup (couple of dolars per year) but they provide additional service, i.e. customer doesn't have to deal with DNS.
- you create portfolio, but it's by default served as a subdomain
- then you decide that you really want to use "mchichol.com". You register through them instead of buying it yourself.
That's it. It's customer's domain, not theirs. They also specify that domain is yours if you ever want to move your site elsewhere.