domains for dummies

[cellio]

Can you believe that I've been online since the ARPAnet and yet, in 2017, do not know the nuts and bolts of domain-name management? Perhaps you, dear reader, will point me toward the clues, and I promise not to be offended that you're quietly snickering there.

The recent LJ upheaval is far from the first signal that really, if you care about durable links, you need to own your own domain, but it's the one that's finally gotten through to me. Instead of relying on Livejournal or Dreamwidth or Medium or whomever else to provide a durable path to my stuff, I ought to control that, so if a service goes belly-up, the old, public URLs still work (with content migrated elsewhere).

What (I think) I would like (please tell me if this is flawed): some domain -- I'll use cellio.org as my example, though that one is taken so I'll need another -- where www.cellio.org points to my ISP-provided web content (which I can easily edit), blog.cellio.org points to my DW journal, medium.cellio.org points to my Medium page, and I can set up other redirects like that as needed. So I can't do anything about links that are already out there, but I can give out better URLs for future stuff (stop the bleeding, in other words). Bonus points if the durable URL stays in the URL bar instead of being rewritten (unlike pobox.com redirects), but that might be hard.

I do not want to run my own web server.

Now I already pay pobox.com for, among things, URL redirection, but it's to a single destination. And it's not at the domain level -- www.pobox.com/~cellio redirects to my ISP-provided web space. It'd be ok, though a little kludgy, if I could manufacture URLs like www.pobox.com/~cellio/blog that do what I described above, but unless there's something I can drop into my own web space, without requiring access to my ISP's web server, I don't think I can do that. Also, this leaves me dependent on pobox.com; owning my own domain sounds like a better idea. pobox.com has been solidly reliable for 20+ years, but what about the next 20?

I understand that I need to (a) buy a domain and (b) host it somewhere, and if I were running my own server then (b) would apparently be straightforward, but I don't know how to do that in this world of distributed stuff and redirects. Also, I'm not really clear on how to do (a) correctly (reliably, at reasonable cost, etc).

So, err, is this a reasonable thing to want to do and, if so, what should I do to make it happen?

Comments

[siderea]

I believe everything you want to do is reasonable, but there's some details I'm hazy on.

You don't want to "run your own server": you want "shared web hosting". My vendor of choice for that these days is [REDACTED - will tell you in DM] and I highly recommend them. I'm paying them $39.48 per year for unlimited domains, and unlimited subdomains at those domains (and all the sub-sub-subdomains unto whatever is the actual protocol limit on such things.) Tremendous price, excellent features, excellent uptime, and superb tech support. They have never insulted my intelligence, even when I have been a doofus. Also, they have been super tolerant about the weird-ass things I do to/on their servers.

Like ~all shared web hosting these days, they run CPanel. This is an industry standard web-based interface to account configuration and application deployment. They also support ssh if you want to get in there and vi your config files for yourself.

Now, as it happens, because I do it myself, I know that it's possible to, instead of having "subdomain.mydomain.tld" point at a directory on the same box as mydomain.tld, have it resolve to a server on the other side of the planet. I have www.mydomain.org and mydomain.org with another hosting company (with other features) in Europe, and lists.mydomain.org along with mybusinessdomain.com, myprofessionalidentitydomain.com, and several other domains, over with this CPanel shared hosting vendor; lists.mydomain.org actually points at my share of their Mailman server.

As to how you would actually do this with DW or Medium, I don't know. I've seen this done for LJ, but I don't know if DW supports "embedding", as they used to call it. I should find out. I'm pretty sure it's possible to slap a domain on one's Medium presence – I think I've seen it done – and if it's possible to do a domain, a subdomain shouldn't be a problem, unless Medium has done something to implement the feature wrongly.

For buying domains, I recommend Namecheap. They are remarkably non-evil for a domain registrar, though their tech support is kind of mediocre. User interface for their service is quite nice.

I would recommend that if you have a domain in mind, you hop-skip to go buy it immediately before anybody else poaches it, and then go figure out how to deploy it at your leisure. You don't need to use a domain you've paid for, or a have a place to serve it. You can buy it and not do anything with it.

ETA: Things you care about in a domain registrar (that's the technical term for a service from which you buy a domain):

1) NOT NETWORK SOLUTIONS.
2) They won't go out of business abruptly leaving you and your domain in some weird legal limbo.
3) They don't have a reputation of either doing evil things to extort money out of you, or make it hard to migrate out of the service, or steal your domains from you or make it easy for others to steal your domains from you, or just spam you into oblivion.
4) Tech support by phone and/or real-time web-based chat.

You should be aware that when buying a domain, it's like a deed: it's a public record. Your name will go into the WHOIS database as the owner of the domain, and you must have a phone number, email address, and mailing address of record there. HOWEVER, there are privacy services, where for a small (~$2/yr) fee, a proxy company will hold your domain for you and put their info in the WHOIS database.

The pros: The WHOIS database is not just harvested by spammers, but fraudsters who send fake bills through the US mail. Having a privacy service largely defeats that.

The cons: 1) The entirety of your legal record of your owning your domain is your WHOIS listing. If your domain registrar goes belly up, and your name is not the one on the WHOIS listing, how will you prove it's yours? This actually apparently happened, and was a huge problem for the people who had used privacy services; maybe it's now a solved problem. 2) While this allows you to register a domain anonymously, if you ever want to move registrars, you will have to expose your real name/record to do so, apparently.

[jducoeur]

Another possible option (easy, although imperfect) -- I manage all of my (numerous) domains, including Querki, through PairNIC, and have done for many years: they're reliable, not too expensive, and professional. The combination of their Forwarding and Custom DNS features gets relatively easy forwarding to arbitrary URLs, although it doesn't preserve the original URL in the browser bar.

For example, http://lochleven.net redirects to House Lochleven's Pennsic Inventory / Wiki Space on Querki. Admittedly, I haven't tried doing this with subdomains yet, but my understanding is that it works easily...