Show HN: Get a personal site on your own domain name in just a few minutes | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Get a personal site on your own domain name in just a few minutes

claimyourname.io

53 pointsdylanbfox44 comments

Who actually owns the domain you build your site on? If ClaimYourName.io gets people to register their own name as a domain but retains ownership that could turn ugly if you wanted to leave the service and keep 'your' domain name, or if ClaimYourName.io goes under.

In the small town where I grew up the One Guy at the biggest web agency quit in anger, and since nobody else at that company had the passwords to liberate the domains, dozens of businesses in my town had to buy new domains and reprint all their material with new URLS on it. What a headache :S

You (the customer) owns the domain. If you cancel your subscription we give you the info to manage your domain going forward. There's some more info in the "do you offer refunds" q/a here: https://www.claimyourname.io/faq/

Really great dylan. Addressing the overhead of DNS settings, and a cumbersome flow for getting a site up (especially for people who aren't too familiar with routing, etc.)

I'd promote the email-address thing a bit more. Often people want a branded email address, but don't know exactly how to go bout it. That would stand out to me (eg. plug-and-play with your existing gmail)

Best of luck!

Thanks for the feedback! I've definitely got to highlight this more, I agree. A lot of my friends got really excited when I mentioned that feature to them.

There was another one of these that made it to the top of Product Hunt the other day...I don't remember the name. They didn't disclose on their lander whether or not they handled domain based email though, so I would say this one is at least better described if not actually better.

I get the value proposition, but I wonder if the positive response to this concept on HN & PH is from actual potential customers, or is one of those things that sounds to a technical crowd like a good idea for our less technical friends. I guess I am curious how many people that would need a simple service like this are interested in owning their own domain.

I agree that most HN readers probably wouldn't use this service, but I will definitely point people to it.

I have set up dozens of sites for friends and relatives over the years. The only reason I'm still paying for shared hosting with WebFaction every month is because some of them are still running blogs / businesses off the crummy site I made for them years ago.

My default response when someone wanted a personal website used to be giving them a WordPress blog. But most people never actually wanted to write content for a blog - they just wanted a domain name and a custom email address, but got overwhelmed when shopping for a domain.

Sending people to a service like this is better for them and better for me.

Good point. I've created personal domain website announcements for each of my kids' births within hours of being born. I used a mix of services, such as Dropbox, IFTTT, and others, to make this possible. I've thought offering a dead-simple solution like this would be well received. But perhaps the interest already correlates with the knowledge to do it, thereby reducing the market for it.

Are you thinking of https://picnic.sh? Even simpler and cheaper, but need to write HTML and no templates.

It's working, neat, well explained, direct and fast. I like it.

A little suggestion: the monthly charge on the billing page could have its own explanation too as does the annual one, I'm not sure.

Thanks for the feedback! That's a good idea. Just to make it as clear as possible.

Very nice. Well executed. I like this "do one thing well" concept and eliminate complexities.

Been working on this project for a few weeks now. You can see an example of a site built with it here: http://www.dylanbfox.com. I wanted to get a personal site up, but didn't feel like building one or spending hours configuring themes on other DIY website builders. That's where the idea for this came from.

Would love feedback on what features I should focus on adding!

Would like to see "gallery" of what the different sites (ie professional vs creative) look like as well as what is and isn't customizable / configurable.

I'm trying to figure out the best way to do this. One option is just have a bunch of links to example sites. So they're displayed full browser. Another is a gallery with screenshots, but they'll be a bit' small since I'd be putting them in a gallery. What would you rather see?

Why not a gallery of screenshots, with the individual screenshots being links to the example sites?

Your own website is not very readable, as the gray texts have little contrast with the background. Tested with Android default browser on an oldish Samsung Galaxy S3.

Hmm, I'll have to do some more cross browser testing. Thanks for taking a look and letting me know what browser you were on!

It would be really cool if you could add SSL encryption by default once some service like Lets Encrypt [1] which issues SSL certificates if you can prove your domain name launches. Not sure how this jives with their terms of use though.

[1] https://letsencrypt.org

Agreed that SSL should be included at least as an option; it's now gone beyond a nice-to-have feature.

The ClaimYourName site reminds me of Strikingly (a YC-funded company), which unfortunately still doesn't support SSL for domains purchased elsewhere: https://twitter.com/declanm/status/590313911271821312

An update: I've found out that Strikingly (which has excellent customer service) will manually add SSL support to a domain purchased elsewhere if you ask them. But if you want SSL, it's probably still easier to buy a domain through them, though.

Good idea! Agreed SSL is a good feature I should get in there quickly. Thanks for checking out the project!

Nice! What do you think about asking a user for the place they live? E.g. German people would also get to choose a .de domain, Polish people .pl one, etc.

This is a great idea, and is something I completely overlooked. I'll be adding this in shortly!

Just curious. Where/who is the proposed domain hoster? Any technical data could also be useful. I see the point in doing the creation as simple as possible, i would like at least to know, bevore i register anything, who i am going to pay and what i pay for. Maby i just overlook it..

Sure! Your site is hosted by ClaimYourName, which is hosted on Heroku. The domain is purchased through Namecheap, and we use its API to configure the domain's zone file to point to your site hosted on ClaimYourName.

The $10.99/year charge is pretty much exactly the cost Namecheap charges us for the 1 year domain registration. We just pass this cost directly on to you. The $6.99/month is "our" charge for a subscription and hosting your site.

Does your setup solve the awkwardness with configuring the root domain at http://example.com to point to Heroku?

Does the hosting autoscale or is it a basic one dyno (or share of a limited number of dynos) setup?

Nope! Customers don't have to do any setup. All of it is handled automatically. We use Namecheap's API to forward your root domain to www, and then point your www CNAME to a subdomain on claimyourname. That configuration tells the app which site to serve up.

So it doesn't support root domains? Using a root domain on Herkou requires configuring some non-standard record (I think it is ANAME).

It's something that annoyed me about Heroku because a lot of people prefer the non-www version of their domain as canonical these days.

How are you handling the Namecheap API's requirement of an IP address whitelist?

Good question! I set up a microservice hosted on a static IP that talks to my Heroku app. If you're trying to do the same and want some help let me know!

I like this idea a lot.

I am a private person, but I made sure to get the .coms of my name, my wife's name, and the names of our 2 (the second one born a month ago) children. I think if this sort of thing appeals even to a misanthrope like me, it should have a huge market.

I like the simplicity. I think the challenge is how to get it in front of your target market at the right time. Could you partner with GoDaddy (etc) to catch people right after they buy a domain?

That's neat. But does anybody have personal web sites any more?

There was at one time a proposed TLD, ".nom", for personal web sites. But social went to Myspace, Facebook, etc.

Very neat! Maybe add in a DNS service on top? Being able to map server.myname.com for private use would be a great feature.

Very cool idea. I'll look into this! Do you think it should be an add-on or come with the subscription?

I recommend using the white background for your own website. Looks darker with black text!

Can one move an existing name and its mailboxes to it?

Right now we're handling this on a case-by-case basis. If you have a domain you want to point to a site hosted on ClaimYourName, you can use the chat box on the bottom of the site to talk to us so we can walk you through the steps.

This is great. Simple but solves a common need.

Thanks for taking a look!

For those who are a bit more technically inclined, it's pretty easy to set up Github pages with your domain.

https://help.github.com/articles/setting-up-a-custom-domain-...

Feedback for dylanbfox: $7/mo seems a bit steep. This is probably shared hosting and a full blown VPS starts at $5/mo on Digital Ocean.

Suggestion for dylanbfox: Add a $20 one time charge to create a droplet preconfigured for $WEBSITE.

$7 is not steep at all. DO is a commodity VPS that requires technical skill to even conceptualize, nevermind set up correctly. This is an easy, nontechnical thing selling convenience. For someone who wants a pretty, simple site, $7/mo is peanuts.

Yeah but it's approaching SquareSpace cost, and they offer a lot more.

You're clearly picturing a different target market than the OP is.

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