Everything you post lives at somebody else's address. Here is the case for having one of your own.
You have a name on the internet, and you don't own it. You have a dozen of them, actually — a handle here, a profile there, a URL somebody else assigned you and can reassign tomorrow. This is normal, and it is strange, and it costs about twelve dollars a year to fix.
Start with what happens when you don't.
Drag the year, or press play. Nothing here leaves the page.
Expand the ones you're skeptical of. The weak arguments for owning a domain are about personal branding. The strong one is smaller and duller: moving is what breaks links — and owning the address means you never have to move again.
Every address you use is on land somebody else owns, under a lease they wrote and can rewrite. That's not cynicism, it's just the arrangement — and the arrangement ends, routinely, for reasons that have nothing to do with you. Acquisition. Pivot. Funding. A storage bill that stopped making sense.
The scale is easy to underestimate. Pew Research found that 38% of the web pages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible ten years later. Not moved — gone. A separate Harvard study of links in New York Times articles found roughly a quarter of all deep links had rotted, rising to most of them for older pieces.
And it doesn't take a shutdown. Twitter still resolves — it just renamed itself, broke every embed, and moved the API that thousands of tools depended on behind a paywall. Instagram is not GeoCities, fine. But too big to disappear and will still work the way you're relying on it are different promises, and only the first one is safe.
Sources: Pew Research Center, “When Online Content Disappears” (2024); Bowers, Stanton and Zittrain, Harvard Law School link-rot study (2021).
A domain isn't a website. It's a signpost you own, and you decide what it points at. Today a hosted page; next year a newsletter; after that, whatever replaces the thing that replaced the last thing.
This is the part people miss: moving is what breaks links. Every time you change platforms, every business card, email signature, résumé, podcast bio and forum post pointing at the old you quietly stops working. Own the address and you never move again — you just change where it points, and every link anyone ever made keeps landing.
you@yourname.com is the one address you never have to update. Change providers, leave the company, drop the ISP whose brand is still sitting in your inbox from 2006 — the address comes with you, because it was never theirs.
Consider what's actually attached to your email: password resets for your bank, your taxes, your kid's school portal, every account you own. That's the master key to your life, and most people keep it in an account they don't control and can't appeal — platforms do disable accounts, sometimes by automated mistake, and when they do they take the mail, the photos, and the reset link for everything else with them.
Owning the domain doesn't stop that. It means you can move the address to a different provider on a Tuesday afternoon and keep every account you own reachable. If you do nothing else on this page, do this one.
On your own domain there is no feed, no ranking model, no penalty for posting a link that leads off-site, no rule change announced at 2am. What you publish is what a visitor sees, in the order you put it.
That matters more than it used to. The alternative is asking a recommendation system for permission to reach people who already, explicitly, chose to hear from you — and being told "not today" for reasons nobody will explain. A domain doesn't get you an audience. It gets you an unmediated one.
Probably not a squatter. The businesses that register names to resell them chase dictionary words and short strings, not private surnames — that threat is usually overstated. The likelier story is duller: somebody who happens to share your name registers it first, for perfectly good reasons of their own, and that is simply that. There's no waiting list and no appeal.
It's worth being precise about the urgency here, because this is where pitches like this one usually cheat. The price won't climb — a name that's free this afternoon will almost certainly be the same price next year. Availability is the thing that's one-way: free until the day it isn't, and then not free again for as long as the other person keeps renewing.
Ten to twenty-five dollars a year for a .com, depending on the registrar. Less than one month of one streaming service, for a permanent address, an email domain that follows you between jobs, and a place on the internet that isn't subject to anyone else's business model.
Priced against what it protects — your correspondence, your work, the links other people made to you — it may be the cheapest insurance in your digital life.
An argument that only lists upsides isn't an argument. Five things that are genuinely true and inconvenient:
You renew every year, forever. Miss a renewal and you're not immediately sunk: a .com goes through roughly two and a half months of grace periods — an auto-renew grace, then a 30-day redemption window where you can still get it back for a restoration fee, then a few days where nobody can have it. Let all of that lapse and the name drops, at which point specialists called drop-catchers — firing thousands of requests a second through hundreds of registrar accounts — take it in the first fraction of a second it's available. Occasionally to sell it back to you. Turn on auto-renew, keep a working card on file, and this is the most common way people lose a name.
The demo at the top cuts both ways, and it would be dishonest not to say so: a domain would not have preserved one GeoCities page or one MySpace track. Those lived on somebody else's hard drives, and no amount of owning yourname.com would have brought them back. What the address buys is that everything pointing at you keeps working while you rebuild somewhere else. Keeping the contents is a separate discipline with a boring name — backups — and you need both.
Registrars advertise a one-dollar first year and renew at forty. Compare renewal prices, not promotional ones, and check what transferring out costs before you need to.
It's the address, not the house. You still need something for it to point at — which can be free, and can be a single page, and can be changed as often as you like.
One wrinkle on the email argument: messages from a brand-new domain land in more spam folders than messages from a decades-old free provider, until enough of yours get delivered and read. Use a real mail host rather than running your own, set up the authentication records they hand you, and give it a few weeks before you route anything critical through it.
.io, .tv, .ly and friends are country-code domains with governments attached, and codes have been retired before when the country changed. They're lovely, and they carry a political dependency that .com doesn't — the 2024 agreement to transfer the Chagos Islands to Mauritius set off exactly this conversation about .io. Worth keeping in proportion: .io is operating normally, retirement runs on a five-to-ten-year wind-down when it happens at all, and .su outlived the Soviet Union by more than three decades. It's a dependency, not a countdown.
Registration data used to be public by default, which is where the horror stories come from. Since 2018 registrars have been required to redact personal details from public lookups, and most also throw in privacy masking on top. Confirm yours does before you type your home address into the form — and note that country-code domains set their own rules.
This is the reason most people don't do it, and it's the weakest one, because it assumes a domain is a project. It isn't. It's an address. Four ways to own one without building anything:
Two more you might be thinking. “I'll just use a link-in-bio page.” That's the same trade with an extra landlord — it would be row eleven of the list above, and when it changes hands or changes its terms, every link you handed out changes with it. Point your own domain at it instead and you keep the convenience without the dependency. “I'd rather not have my name out there.” Then don't use your name: a domain doesn't have to be your legal one, it doesn't have to have anything on it, and an address nobody visits still carries your mail.
The internet you use in ten years will not be the internet you use today. The platforms will be different, the feeds will be different, the buttons will have moved, and a few of the places you're posting tonight will be a paragraph on a page like this one. The only part that can stay yours is the part with your name on it. Go get the address. Point it wherever you like.
One HTML file, no frameworks, no trackers — nothing you type here leaves the page. Dates and figures are as reported at the time of writing; the platforms are, sadly, real. · more fun pages