Owning Your Private Space on the Internet is Easy and Secure
Buying versus renting is an important decision. Just like many physical items you can also choose to own your space on the Internet. For many reasons related to privacy, technical features, and professional appearance having a custom a web space is very valuable.
Family Websites
During the early days of Facebook the site was a good place to keep up with distant family and friends. Public arguments about politics could be easily ignored, but I have noticed the sharp increase in division along with the equally sharp decrease in family photo sharing.
A solution could be a private website intended for one family or maybe a family and the extended cousins. If the family wishes, the website could be members-only/password-protected. This allows for family members to share photos, news, updates social media style in a private manner. For a strongly connected family this would be an excellent way to bring back what was enjoyable about early social media.
The first email address that most people had was likely connected to their Internet provider (Back in the day AOL, Prodigy, etc) therefore whenever the customer changed their service they also lost their email. Later when free email services became popular like Yahoo and Gmail the business model required the provider to scan the user’s email for advertisement targeting.
A custom domain with varying amounts of storage can be bought now for less than $40/year. For that amount of money you are buying privacy and removing any concern about who is reading your email. You are also buying independence from any single provider. I have my personal email @ericbrake.ws forwarded to a Gmail address, but I am not tied to Gmail. At any time I could decide to change the address it forwards to or even setup an inbox with it’s own storage.
Professional Appearance
The email address you distribute to customers says what kind of business you are. funnymonkey34@yahoo.com presents the image of someone who is only doing their work part-time. As your business grows, owning your own email gives the appearance of permanence and professionalism.
Owning a domain also allows flexibility in creating multiple addresses for different purposes. Let’s say your an online seller and you list your items on multiple garage sale sites, Ebay, and Amazon. An efficient way to organize email coming from buyers on all of these sites would be to setup ebay@servicefirst.work, bookoo@servicefirst.work, etc as forwarding addresses to a central primary address. Email can be directed into separate folders using filters for each site.
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