Posted on: Tuesday, May 3, 2005

Own a Web domain and you've got mail

By John M. Moran
Hartford (Conn.) Courant

Not everyone wants to maintain a Web site. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't register a personal Internet domain name.

Net users are registering domain names so they can create and control their own e-mail address.

It's a smart idea, and one that's increasingly affordable, as both the price of domain name registration and the cost of e-mail hosting have plunged.

First, domain registration. That's the process that lets you create an address for yourself — yourname.com or virtually anything else you please — on the Internet.

Competition among companies that register domain names has squeezed the annual cost of owning a domain name to well below $10 in most cases.

And you're not limited to .com or .org or .net. Your address can just as easily be yourname.tv, yourname.info, yourname.us, yourname.biz or a variety of others.

Naturally, some of the best personal domain names were snapped up years ago. But with a little creativity, you should be able to fashion something snappy and memorable. Many registration sites have special software designed to suggest names.

A domain name alone isn't much good, however. In fact, it's rather like having a phone number and no phone. What you need with it is a place where messages directed to your new address can go.

For those who don't want a personal Web site, Internet hosting companies are pushing e-mail-only hosting services that simply catch the e-mail sent to your domain name until you collect it, or forward it to you at another e-mail address.

The beauty of these e-mail hosting services is that, like domain names, they are tremendously affordable compared to what they once cost.

Some firms offer e-mail hosting for less than $10 a year. What that means is you can have your own e-mail address — let's say, somebody@somebody.com — for under $20 a year. That beats hanging on to an old America Online account or some other old e-mail address that you once got stuck with.

For a bit more, say $20 a year for e-mail hosting on top of the $10 annual domain registration fee, you can get several addresses for that domain name: such as, dad@somebody.com, mom@somebody.com, etc.

You have to dig a little to find these services, but they are out there. Try Web searches on "e-mail hosting" or "e-mail accounts." Or search for "domain registration" and browse the resulting sites for hosting services.