You should have your own domain

A few weeks ago I posted a tutorial on pointing a domain at a website. This reminded me of some important things about the web that I'd like to highlight.

• Do you have a place online that you link people to, perhaps to find information about you?
• Do you also share links to web projects you made?

📣 You should have your own domain!

But the link you send people already works doesn’t it? That’s great, but there is huge benefit to having your own domain.

The web we have

There will be no nostalgia in this post, but for context on where the web has been and where it's going, check out Anil's talk from Oh the Humanity – there's a lot to be optimistic about!

Owning your own domain is about having control over how you represent yourself and your work online.

Your domain is not your website

If you bought a domain from a web host, this might seem confusing – the domain and the website that appears at it are part of the same package, so they must be the same thing right? Nope! Your host might have a flow that automatically points the domain at the hosting you bought from them, but they are actually separate. You can point your domain somewhere else!

Often companies act as web hosting providers and domain registrars, meaning they can sell you a domain and some “space” on the web to put content that people will see when they visit it.

• Your domain is an address that points at a location on the web
• Your website content is accessible at such a location through hosting

Owning the domain gives you more control

OK but registrars, hosts, web services, these are all just companies, so whatever way you look at it, you’re not in control are you? Well, to an extent no! But there is a difference. DNS is one of the few parts of the web with real regulatory oversight – for example, domain registrars are accredited by ICANN, so that affords you a level of reliability over your domain ownership.

If the place you send people to discover info about you is at a domain owned by a third party company, your control over what people see when they visit can go away very easily. A company can change leadership / ownership and move in a direction you don't like, make changes that break your site, or go out of business and disappear off the web!

Signs you don’t own a domain

Is the part customized to you in the subdomain, or path, like:

suesmith.glitch.me

or

github.com/suesmith

These are both places on the web that I publish to but don’t own the domains (Glitch and GitHub own them). On the other hand, I do own suesmith.dev and suesmith.lol and I point these both at my Glitch site (I don’t have the .com, it’s a common name!)

Point a domain at your stuff!

If you created a project that can be accessed online, it's probably less hassle than you think to get a domain for it.

I’ve got a couple of different domains pointing at my Glitch in Bio site. This is handy for services that give you a profile where you can include a link – by using your own domain, you can rest assured that people with the link will land somewhere valid. Even if the underlying service you used to make your website has disappeared – you’ll just point the domain somewhere else.

Point your domains somewhere

Do you buy domains for projects you haven’t actually built yet? Me too lol. I may have a small domain impulse buying issue, but when I buy a new one I just grab a Glitch remix and point the domain there. If I later decide to build something for it somewhere else, all I need to do is switch out the location the domain is pointing to. Here’s where I would do that for the domain I pointed at my Glitch site in the last tutorial.

In my Fastly account, I’d navigate to the service:

Click Edit configuration and Clone .

In the Origins, click the pencil edit icon next to the Host.

Change the host Address to the location of the new origin. Scroll down and click Update.

Activate the new service version. It may take a few moments, and it might be a good idea to clear the cache if I want visitors to see the new origin quickly. I can do that over in the Service summary, with Purge all.

And if I didn’t want the domain to go through Fastly for TLS or the CDN anymore, in my registrar account, I’d switch the CNAME record for the www version of my domain to point wherever else I wanted.

Spin up a synthetic homepage for your WIP projects

Here’s a template for a synthetic homepage you can use to show placeholder content at a domain while you work on a project. Fastly will serve the page from Compute, so you don’t even have to set up a website to use as origin or think about hosting until you’re ready:

• Visit the synthetic-home template repo on GitHub
• Hit Deploy to Fastly
• This will clone a copy of the repo into your GitHub account and deploy it to Fastly (you’ll need to log into to GitHub and grab a Fastly API key)
• Tweak the content in /src/homepage.html to suit – when you push to your main branch in the GitHub repo, Fastly will redeploy the site
• You'll get a default edgecompute.app domain, but can point your own domain at your Fastly service using the flow we covered last time

It's your web

Having authentic, verifiable spaces where we share information is going to be more important than ever with the proliferation of AI-generated content forcing us to redefine how we establish trust on the web.

You should have your own domain! But maybe not 40 of them.

🎁 It’s Christmas, so the first ten readers to comment about the websites you're working on that could use a domain will get a code for a free .dev domain! Tell me about your weird side projects… Our domain code offer has now expired, thank you for sharing!

Update Jan 2024: Want to get your own website up and running but don't know where to begin? Check out Start a personal website!