Comments on: Why I'm Letting My Server Space Subscription Lapse

By: Do You Really Need a Website?

Do You Really Need a Website? — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:54:30 +0000

[...] me to ask around and find out what the reasoning was to NOT have a website. The blog here talks about an entrepreneur who gives 5 points for why he is canceling his site. Although he [...]

By: Dan

Dan — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 11:04:12 +0000

“Even if you’re only paying between $100 and $200 a year for server space and domain name registration”

Wow – you need to shop around. I pay under $50 year to host my WordPress-based site.

By: Why Professionals Still Need Their Own Web Sites

Why Professionals Still Need Their Own Web Sites — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 18:01:41 +0000

[...] 16th, 2009 (11:00am) Charles Hamilton No CommentsTweet This Yesterday, Darrell wrote that he is discontinuing his personal web site. Yes, designing and maintaining an attractive and effective web site takes time and money, but even [...]

By: Dan B.

Dan B. — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 15:51:32 +0000

Darrell, I understand your points about maintenance and freshness and distraction–all three are issues. It seems to me that maintenance and distraction are taken care of mostly by getting a good design and a solid solution for presenting your content and then forcing yourself to stop tweaking (easier said than done for me).

Regarding freshness, it wouldn’t be that hard to regularly update your homepage with links to your latest posts here, right? WordPress and other CMS packages can be made to display rss and Twitter feeds with the simple addition of a plugin.

By: Dan B.

Dan B. — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 15:44:50 +0000

I like the idea of securing domains for my kids–hadn’t considered that before.

By: Meg Guiseppi

Meg Guiseppi — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 10:39:32 +0000

Darrell, you may not have considered that, if you let your websites lapse, search engines will still include them in search results for your name for quite some time. People clicking through to those sites will get a dead link, unless you redirect every web page. How do you suppose dead links will impact your brand? That certainly won’t give a good impression of you.

Although it’s a pain and perhaps a distraction to have to keep up with less valuable websites, I think it makes sense to incorporate the time into your regular marketing maintenance to update those sites every few months or so, or hire someone to do it.

If those sites have been around for a while, they have some Google power, and with a little work, could perhaps become more valuable to you.

By: Steven Howe

Steven Howe — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 10:18:41 +0000

Darrell, you’d think that with all the freelance designers and marketing bloggers that read / subscibe to these posts you wouldn’t be in this situation.

Maybe in a few weeks when I’ve gotten a bit more established as a freelancer I’ll get in touch and see where you’re at. ;)

In the meantime, I would seriously recommend keeping your domains, even it you end up re-directing them to your Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn profiles. You may want them back later and find some ad-site squatting on them (boo, hiss!). If you find them currently too expensive, have a look around for an alternative supplier.

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:05:14 +0000

I was in the same position a few months ago. I kept the hosting so I could have a way of controlling the domain name. This hosting also had email and so on.

My new solution is that my domain is hosted via WordPress. My WordPress site is now my new personal home page and the jump point for everything else.

WordPress domain hosting also has pre built support for Google Apps so my mail is now there.

Finally all my photos are with SmugMug.

So overall, I am paying the same sort of money each year as I did before but somebody else does all the hard work at a server level and I can just concentrate on the content. In addition I don’t have the same sorts of space limitations as I had before.

By: Daryl Griffiths

Daryl Griffiths — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:37:40 +0000

Dan (when you’ve finished your course at charm school), who said they’re doing this anyway?

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 18:55:18 +0000

As someone who does web development, it’s next to impossible to not have a website. I’m amazed at the number of people who now consider it perfectly acceptable to put an @gmail.com account on business cards. Kids these days…
I agree with Stephen–I like the control. Even if my design stagnates, it’s mine.