1y ago

domain name with your own name?

So I got hold of a domain that shows my exact full name. I thought it would be useful for showing up as "professional" when working in IT and sending resumes.

I got some mail forwarded using the domain registrar. I also made a small static website, which only has hello world for now but soon will get the contents filled up.

But then... what? I suppose I can host anything I want, but then there's the whole "real name - gotta look professional" aspect that makes me weary of hosting a Lemmy instance, for example, when the domain without my name attached wouldn't.

I suppose having personal domains were cool in the 90s where people were barely learning about "the internets". Not so anymore?

Is there a usefulness in having a domain name with your real name attached on this age?

36 comments

If you do any sort of programming, this would be a good place to showcase screen shots of some things you have built (maybe with redacted company names/identifiers).

Use a second domain for your less professional stuff?
It is a bit of gimic though, and I suspect rather than coming across as professional on your resume, it will probably be more of a "huh, cool" kinda thing?
- I have issues where companies won't let me register because 'you can't have your last name as the @lastname'. They don't trust it or whatever...I dunno
  They have no issues trying to mail me their spam fliers but won't let me use it to communicate with them. Kinda fucky..but yes it is more of a that's cool moment.
  
  Lol, I often get a lot of confirmations on if my email address is right whenever I am in contact with any customer service... I use a catch-all on lastname[dot]com.
  "Is your email really 'nameofservice@lastname•com'?"
- Yeah, that's what happens, something cool but that's it. It would be nice if l could use it for something else other than a glorified online resume.
  I also bought a cheap domain for experimenting around, so that's where all my "not so professional" stuff goes.

I use a “real name” domain. My last name ends in the letters “in”, so I bought a .in domain, such that the domain name is my last name with a dot in it.
Can’t honestly recommend that approach. It’s a cute gimmick, but when non-technical people ask for your email address and it doesn’t end in a TLD they recognize, their heads explode. I usually give out my gmail address.
- There are multiple of us! I did the exact same thing, except for using my own name. Mine ends in .re of Réunion. I think it's fun so I'm keeping it.
  For sharing it offline I have a big text widget on my phone. They usually get it if they can read it, but not if I spell it out.
- I did first@last.me and can confirm, it confuses people all too often.
  
  I have first@last.email, and my community rec organization couldn't even accept it because their system had a hard coded lost of TLDs it would recognize for email addresses.
- I got firstlast.info (it used to be cheap)

It's good for email and personal sites (those aren't dead, but they're more popular for people that either write a lot or are self-employed). I'd only use a personal domain for self hosted apps if the users are just you and your family.
For something like hosting Lemmy, with users you don't know, I wouldn't use the same domain as where you host your other personal stuff, even if it's not your name.

I bought a fun domain in '98, used it for email only. Next to that I bought a domain with just my surname. I have several sites in that domain, for my personal stuff, one for the pets, our wedding,... It's a lot more flexible then using the complete name. (But you have to be lucky enough to catch it)
Next to these 2 I have 2 others in my countries tld for messing about with. Those are a lot cheaper and my company has 3 more domains. The total set costs me €90 a year.

I just use mine for email and subdomains to the personal services I host. Though mines just my last name (followed by -net because there's some big businesses that use my last name and they took all the decent domains). That way my email is first@last-net.com

Personally, I have firstname@secondname.email That was a domain I set up when I was self employed, contracting for people, trying to look 'professional' I still use it to this day, though the professional requirement is gone now since I'm employed by a company. Still, it's catchy and not that expensive, so I keep it, and renew for long periods of time.
Then I have another domain, not personally identifiable, for whatever stuff I want to host/play with. This one is a three letter .ac domain, I got 10 years for $200 ish. The three letters are my initials
So you say, is there usefulness in having a real name domain? Not unless it's your business. For me, when I was contracting, it was a simple attempt to get clients to remember me over the hundreds of others
To me, ones like joeblacktechnicalservices@gmail.com always seem like a lazy attempt, for a 'business'
- Its very ingrained on me that a proper business should be able to spare a few on a domain for themselves, as I remember it before the dot-com bubble.
  Now? Websites have been displaced by social media altogether and many small business simply prefer having an Instagram profile, for example.
  
  You should never depend 100% on another platform for your only business presence. You can get banned on Instagram, Facebook etc. very easily. Treat them like a billboard not like your home.

I host some private stuff on mine, hidden behind an authentication service that is. But because I just use a wildcard no-one can really tell what I have hosted - the same login page occurs for every subdomain, regardless of whether it's actually wired up to something.
That doesn't help with services you wish to make semi-public (like a lemmy instance) though.
- Interested in learning about the wildcard. How do you set up the DNS to accept that?
  
  I'm using cloudflare as my DNS, and it's literally just:
  Create an A record.
  Set the name to *
  Set the IP to the appropriate server
  You may want to untick the proxy, depending on what you're hosting. If it's web stuff only it's fine, but if you're doing anything else as well it'll get in the way.
  On the letsencrypt side, it's pretty similar. Create a certificate with domain.name and *.domain.name (if you want them to share a cert) and you're off.
  
  I have a similar setup.
  Getting the DNS to return the right addresses is easy enough: you just set your records for subdomain * instead a specific subdomain, and then any subdomain that's not explicitly configured will default to using the records for *.
  Assuming you want to use Let's Encrypt (or another ACME CA) you'll probably want to make sure you use an ACME client that supports your DNS provider's API (or switch DNS provider to one that has an API your client supports). That way you can get wildcard TLS certificates (so individual subdomains won't still leak via Certificate Transparency logs). Configure your ACME client to use the Let's Encrypt staging server until you see a wildcard certificate on your domains.
  Some other stuff you'll probably want:
  A reverse proxy to handle requests for those subdomains. I use Caddy, but basically any reverse proxy will do. The reason I like Caddy is that it has a built-in ACME client as well as a bunch of plugins for DNS providers including my preferred one. It's a bit tricky to set this up with wildcard certificates (by default it likes to request individual subdomain certificates), but I got it working and it's been running very smoothly since.
  To put a login screen before each service I've configured Caddy to only let visitors through to the real pages (or the error page, for unconfigured domains) if Authelia agrees.

Use your surname with a personal domain. Then you can link up other family members to it. Eg. dave@cammeron.me . Otherwise you've got to have an email address dave@davecammeron.me which looks stupid.
Use your organisation as your work email. boris@megacorp.com, boris.bloke@megacorp.com bb@megacoro.com ceo@megacorp.com
You then separate the work and personal emails. Sending personal emails through a corporate server using the corporate domain is fair game to use in a court, you're ostensibly representing the company and it's not a personal email.
There are various hilarious stories about people losing rights to their name etc post internet era when their company was purchased.
Don't try to run a mail server yourself, that became counter productive about the 2010s. I used to run servers easily last century when there was almost no-one sending email, then the sp-/sc-ammers 'entered the room'.
Accidentally clicking on a wrong email on a unsecure environment can ruin your day if you're tired and just keep clicking mindlessly.
Good luck. Especially if you have a popular surname that your family doesn't own.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters

DNS Domain Name Service/System
IP Internet Protocol
SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption
TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 10 acronyms.
[Thread #283 for this sub, first seen 15th Nov 2023, 13:25] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
- This is so useful! In this post I already knew all abbreviations but I would love this everywhere. Is it reading context for cases where multiple things can be substituted? I'm pretty sure it isn't the Magic game people refer to when they keep referencing mtg in threads regarding us politics

Fewer Letters	More Letters
DNS	Domain Name Service/System
IP	Internet Protocol
SSL	Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption
TLS	Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL

I use a domain with my surname in it to host only things where I reveal my identity anyway. my Linkstack, my personal blog, etc.
I did have to exchange a couple emails with the legal department of a very wealthy company after I registered it because my last name is part of their company name.
- How did that exchange go?
  They try to tell you that you can't use your last name?
  
  Yeah, basically. I laid it out that it was my actual surname, and not only was the domain not going to be used in their industry, but wouldn’t be used commercially at all. At that point they backed down and basically said ok but if you try anything funny we’ll be back.
  I did a lot of digging at the time and you actually can trademark a surname, kinda, but there are a lot of specific circumstances surrounding it that I could have also argued didn’t apply. Problem is, they know full well I couldn’t afford to fight them on it in court so if they really wanted it taken down they probably could have pushed me into it. The biggest factor was that the surname is incredibly rare and the average person would only associate it with their company, it would be a totally different case if they were “John Smith inc” which would be a lot harder to defend. Once they saw I was just a guy with the surname using it for personal websites though, the fact that they backed off was kinda cool since they probably could have pressed me way harder if they really wanted to.

About ten years ago I set up domains for my name, my wife's name and my 2 kids. Each has both full formal names and normal nicknames. Costs less than $200 per year and would be cheaper than buying just one of them down the road if needed.

Using my real surname for email was ok a few years ago, but I don't have a common surname, and with GeoIP I just felt having a personally identifiable domain name / URL was 1 step towards lack of privacy.
For example anyone lookong for nextcloud.thatstheguy.com was going to be fairly confident they were brute-forcing MY system. (Yes, I know, MFA...)
Short & snappy is a much better approach IMHO

Personally I try not to attach my real name or picture to anything that isn't related to a job interview or my current employment. I'm planning to buy my realname domain, because I know it's free and it probably always will be. The only thing that I'll use it for is professional email, as I slowly phase out google.
I have a handful of other domains for fun stuff, which reveal nothing about me.

What I did (a few years ago now) was add http authentication to the ports where I ran my personal projects and left my projects port public. Don't think I have to worry about recruiters brute forcing a password, hah.
I think it adds a little credibility to the fact that it's actually you.

36 comments