Own a Domain

A domain is an easy way to future-proof your online identity and has lots of everyday tangible benefits. Even for non-techies.

Lately I’ve been getting asked about privacy and life online by friends, coworkers, even grandparents.

Planning a wedding without inbox chaos or drowning in group chats, launching a professional side-gig, trying to end the suffering of spam from years of neglecting digital hygiene, looking to de-google.

Things anyone might want to do these days.

If you want a fuller picture on privacy, Privacy Guides is great. But for most people that rabbit hole (which only begins on Privacy Guides) can wait until later.

Start with the basic thing that will keep paying off:

Get Your Own Domain

No hype. It’s cheap, quick, and you don’t need to be a techie. It gets you tangible benefits.

Let’s walk through some of them.

Email

This is probably one of the most boring and one of the most “thank yourself later” things you can do with your own domain. It’s also one of the most impactful.

  • You get lots of spam because your address has been sold to data brokers and leaked in data breaches
  • Your xxxAlucardSoHot2283xxx​@hotmail.com address doesn’t quite cut it for your resumé, or it got too cringy for your taste
  • You get married and sharing an alice_and_joe5124​@gmail.com address with others leads to typos and is inconvenient
  • You don’t like how Gmail does email
  • You don’t want your email provider scraping your emails for data
  • You were algorithmically banned out of the blue and your account is unrecoverable because of nonexistent support

Those are some of the email things you can resolve with your own domain.

If you’ve been using an email address for a long time all over the web, I’d say that’s a growing privacy concern. Over time, your email address is getting linked with more and more services, some of which may be directly connected with your identity. And changing email addresses is such an incredible chore if you’re been using it everywhere. As always, privacy and convenience oppose each other.

Changing from your ancient or cringy address to another really only gets you a new start with the same outcome. So I get that it’s not worth the effort.

Aliases

On the other hand, I’d argue that changing to firstname​@lastname.com (or whatever domain you go with) will probably be the last time you’ll switch emails. Why? Because you won’t be using that address everywhere. And I don’t mean that you’ll keep using your old address alongside the new one. You’ll be using aliases instead.

I found that I get the best of both privacy and convenience using Fastmail, but there’s lots of other options. Fastmail allows me to create masked email addresses, so I can sign up with a different address everywhere. Every service I sign up for gets a different one. Various online stores, social networks, Google, Apple, my internet provider, my cellular provider, my bank, my landlord, and so on. And they all go into my single mailbox.

If a service leaks my data and I start getting bombarded with spam, I can easily just nuke that one address. Because all the addresses are different from each other, I also get insight into who leaked or sold my data. At the same time, I have stable addresses (like the one in the legals on this site) for handing out to people, and I don’t sign up anywhere with those.

And this isn’t just mumbo-jumbo for techies, there are very practical uses too. Creating a mailbox for yourself and your partner each and having an alias forwarding email to both of you is a nice way of managing finances and the household.

The Infrastructure

Aside from a domain, you should explore where to host your emails.

Fastmail delivers mail well and has a good spam filter. The featureset and high service quality just makes it comparatively expensive. If Fastmail is too expensive, take a look at Forward Mail or Namecheap.

Most domain providers also offer email hosting. Beware though, those services are of varying quality, and you don’t want your email to be bad. Most of them don’t offer a masked email feature like Fastmail, but they usually let you manually create aliases like bank​@yourdomain.com or amazon​@yourdomain.com. Not as convenient, but the result is effectively the same. In any case, if you like the idea of aliases, avoid services that let you create a limited amount of them.

Now, after investing all that work into changing my email provider and setting up all the aliases, what if the provider goes under? In the unlikely event that Google decided to end Gmail, or suddenly banned you for whatever reason, you’d be forced to go through the change completely unprepared.

If your email hoster ended their service or banned you, you’d still have your domain, and could move over to another service without changing any addresses. If your domain provider goes under, you can just move to another. It’s independent. I previously changed my email hosting from Google Workspace (one of the paid business plans) to Mailcheap to Fastmail, completely without disruptions.

Professional Benefits

Aside from the obvious fact that your custom email address can look more professional and trustworthy, having a domain lets you host websites on the internet, like the one you’re currently visiting. In your case that might be a blog, but it might also be your CV for example. You’re not limited by lastname.com as well. You can also easily set up subdomains like cv.lastname.com and host many things.

See it as your little home on the internet - professional and personal. We had Geocities websites and MySpace profiles back in the day (man, I’m dating myself aren’t I), and this is something similar.

You don’t have to build it yourself either. There’s lots of platforms you can use to create a good personal website without having to learn to code. For a personal website, check out Bear, Ghost, micro.blog, or Carrd if you’re looking for something simple that just works. If you want to dig deeper, take a look at Framer, Webflow, and omg.lol, or really do learn a bit of HTML and CSS and build it yourself.

There’s lots of excellent inspiration for what to put on your website.

Self-hosting

I’d say this one’s pretty niche, but interesting nonetheless. Of course if you can host websites, you can also host other kinds of services.

A common one may be backing up your family’s photo library and letting them access it remotely. Same for wedding photos for example. The easiest way to do that would probably be hosting Immich on PikaPods. Immich has a nice web interface as well as polished apps.

Among others, I host Actual Budget to keep track of my finances and Navidrome as my personal music streaming service.

My setup is more involved, but using PikaPods you get up and running in a matter of minutes. That can get you pretty far, and you’re not locked into any particular service. In any case, should you choose to move the hosting, your domain will stay the same. If you shared the address to your family photos with anyone, they won’t even know the hosting changed.

How to Get a Domain

Now, I’ve dropped a few recommendations here and there throughout this post. But how do you actually set it up? Is it really that easy and cheap?

Choosing a Domain Name

Chances are you’re not the only person in the world who thinks that getting lastname.com is a good idea. Probably that one’s already taken if you look it up. You’ll likely need to choose not only the domain name, but also the ending.

I went for the Montenegran .me to signal that this is my personal website for example. Michael Lynch has some good advice on selecting a domain name for use with your partner, but it’s applicable to any personal domain I’d say.

To quickly find available domains, I like to use TLD-List and Namecheap’s Domain Name Search. TLD-List is also great to compare prices between domain registrars.

If you don’t plan to move away from the country you’re in, and if that country is somewhat stable, it may make sense to get a two-letter cTLD (Country Top Level Domain). Otherwise, maybe go for something completely different. Also TLDs have reputations, which can influence how often emails you send will go into spam. If you want to be extra sure, check out Spamhaus’ regular Domain Reputation Report for TLDs to avoid.

Choosing a Domain Registrar

There are lots of them, and for personal use you should go with one of the cheaper ones that maybe people you know trust, or that are generally trusted. I personally had good experiences with Namecheap, Porkbun as well as Netim.

I’d prefer companies that focus on domains instead of ones that offer an extremely wide range of services, like GoDaddy or Cloudflare. These are larger platforms with less (or no) human support, and it really stings to lose infrastructure such as domains. You really want to be able to talk to a human in case things go sideways.

Prices vary wildly between TLDs. A .com goes should go for around $10-15 USD/year. My jama.me domain currently costs me $17.27 USD/year on Porkbun.

Now What?

Once you’ve found an available domain name and the registrar you want to purchase the domain with, let’s go step by step:

  1. Sign up at the domain registrar with your old email address. You’ll change that once you’re done
  2. Purchase your domain
  3. Your domain registrar will let you set DNS records for your domain. Find that list, you’ll need to edit it.
  4. Sign up with the email hoster
    • Fastmail lets you immediately sign up with a custom domain. Others may not, so you’ll sign up with your old email address there too.
  5. The email hoster will provide you with instructions on which DNS records to set in your domain. Add the records as instructed
    • Here’s Fastmail’s article on that explaining what the records do. The records are going to be similar for other email hosters as well.
  6. Wait for a little while (usually an hour, can be up to a day)
    • This is because DNS, the phone book of the internet, is a distributed system. When you set records in your domain, the registrar will notify DNS servers around the world about the change. It can take a hot minute for all the providers to have heard about it.
  7. Add your new email address to email apps on your devices, verify it works
    • If you added the SRV type records as well, it should magically auto-configure like Gmail or Outlook.
    • Send yourself an email, send friends and family one, let them write you!
  8. Create an email alias
  9. Change the account email at your domain registrar to the alias you created
    • If you had to sign up with your old email address at your new email hoster, change the address to an alias there as well, or keep the old address as a backup.
  10. Start your journey of changing email addresses at all the relevant services you signed up with over the years
    • If you have been using a password manager, or at least have saved logins in your browser, this might be a lot easier than otherwise.
    • If you plan to abandon the old email address, this might also be the time to decide which services you don’t use anymore.
    • Here’s a list of websites and services to start with:
      1. Shopping websites (Amazon, eBay, Craigslist, etc.)
      2. Financial services (Bank, Trading platform, Crypto exchange, etc.)
      3. Social networks (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, Reddit, Discord, Bluesky, Mastodon, etc.)
      4. Entertainment services (YouTube, Patreon, Netflix, Spotify, Audible, Steam, etc.)
      5. Device platform accounts (Google, iCloud, Microsoft/Xbox, Nintendo, Sony, etc.)
      6. Infrastructure providers (Home internet, cell service, utilities, etc.)
      7. Smart home devices (Eufy, Philips, Nest, Ubiquiti, Sonos, Lutron, etc.)
      8. Software services (Adobe, Microsoft, Backblaze, Notion, 1Password, YNAB, etc.)
      9. Sports and health services (Health insurance, Gym, Peloton, etc.)
      10. Educational services (School/university, Duolingo, Udemy, etc.)
      11. Transportation (Car insurance, public transport card, car infotainment, etc.)
      12. Old-school forums
  11. Make more use of your little place on the web

Conclusion

Whether it’s to de-google your life a bit, to combat chaos in your inbox, to present yourself professionally, or if it’s to set up a side gig - having your own domain is a good way to bring structure and hygiene into your and your close ones’ digital life.

Yes, it’s a pain in the ass to switch email addresses. But with full control over your email address, this time will probably be your last. And you get to carve out your little space on the web.