Why you should use a custom domain for your personal website
When you first create an account on Pagecord you get a subdomain on the primary pagecord.com domain, like this one – blog.pagecord.com. It's free, zero hassle, and you can start blogging immediately.
This is fine and works for people for years, even decades, but if you've decided to put a stake in the ground and commit to having a personal website for the long haul, you should consider using a custom domain rather than piggybacking on someone else's (even Pagecord's!). There are a couple of reasons why:
1. More control over your online identity
Using someone else's domain, whether that's pagecord.com, substack.com or medium.com, means you're somewhat trapped. All your posts will be on a subdomain like olly.pagecord.com/about. If you never move, there's no problem whatsoever, but if you did decide to move to another platform in the future (or if your platform of choice gets acquired or goes bust), all your old links won't automatically redirect. I'm looking at ways to address this for people who subscribe to Pagecord Premium and decide to move, but if you're on Substack, Medium or Blogger – no chance.
I'm planning for Pagecord to be around for the long haul, but if you use a custom domain, you get full control over which platform sits behind it, now and in the future. If you move, you can point the domain to your new home, and your readers – and search engines – continue to follow you automatically.
It's essentially an insurance policy for your online identity.
2. It looks better
While I think the pagecord.com domain is pretty cool and subdomains look good (olly.pagecord.com), there's something neat about seeing https://olly.world. A custom domain can look more professional, or more fun, depending on the audience you're trying to attract.
There's a certain satisfaction in trawling Namecheap and finding a domain that fits you, and it's a little easier these days now that there are hundreds of top-level domains to choose from (but admittedly this can still be a time-consuming PITA if you're as indecisive as me!).
I'm convinced, how do I buy a domain?
Buying a domain is pretty easy – there are lots of registrars out there. Costs vary depending on the top-level domain you choose (newer TLDs can cost more), and the registrar. Big companies like Namecheap are pretty good, but I now use Cloudflare for Pagecord because they offer domain registration and renewal at cost for over 390 TLDs.
I bought one, what do I do now?
Once you've bought a domain, you need to tell the internet where to send visitors when they type in your new address. Your registrar (the company you bought the domain from) typically has a DNS settings area. DNS is basically the internet's phone book, translating domain names into an internet GPS coordinate for where your website actually lives.
You'll only need to set up one or two records:
-
CNAME Record: You typically use this if your website lives on a subdomain like
www.mydomain.comorblog.mydomain.com. -
ALIAS or A Record: You'd use one of these to point your domain to a specific server if you want your site to be on the "root" domain, i.e. without
www– somydomain.cominstead ofwww.mydomain.com. ALIAS is better, but not all DNS providers support it.
Most registrars will have step-by-step guides for doing this, or you can just ask an LLM like Google Gemini, Claude or ChatGPT.
Custom domains with Pagecord Premium
Pagecord Premium customers get custom domain support, and Pagecord also manages the fiddly www and root domain challenge (both work automatically). It's actually really simple to set up once you've bought your domain, and there's a handy guide on the help site.
A custom domain is a small investment ($10-30/year) that gives you ownership over your personal corner of the internet. If you're fairly serious about your personal website and blog, it's worth the small effort and ongoing cost of owning a domain. And if you're not ready yet, or just not bothered, that's totally fine – your pagecord.com subdomain isn't going anywhere!