Over the last couple of days I have been thinking about how to tidy up my domain names and where they are hosted. I wanted a clear naming structure and hosting arrangements, which are not necessarily the same thing. I ended up with the following:
1) my main domain name is http://www.david-ankers.com/, the site for which is hosted on my MobileMe account. At the moment this is forwarded from my registrar, so the name at the top of the welcome page is http://www.me.com/dave61/dave61/welcome.html. I would like to transfer the name to MobileMe to avoid this, but my first attempts at doing so failed. My other domains, the variations such as dave-ankers.com, are all forwarded to http://www.david-ankers.com/.
2) my blog is located at WordPress, http://davidankers.wordpress.com/, and I have set up a sub-domain, http://blog.david-ankers.com/, which forwards to directly to it. Also, you can see the latest postings on my main site via an RSS feed.
3) my best photographs are also on the main site, where there is some explanation, or the gallery directly either at http://gallery.me.com/dave61 or another forwarded sub-domain http://photos.david-ankers.com/.
My main point in this post is that owning your own domain name gives you flexibility about where you host your site(s) and the ability to change location without changing the address. It doesn’t have to cost much either: around £2 per year for a .me.uk account (I use http://1and1.co.uk/) and a free account at http://wordpress.com/ or http://blogger.com/ are enough to give you a professional looking presence.
UPDATE
I had another go at getting david-ankers.com to appear in the URL of my MobileMe site. I swear that I did exactly the same as last time but this time … it worked, sort of! Now the welcome page appears as http://www.david-ankers.com/DavidAnkers/welcome.html which is an improvement but I would like to get rid of the DavidAnkers bit. I know how to do that on a site hosted at 1and1 but not (yet) for MobileMe.