I bought a domain...

[guedo79]

I'm offically a geek with too much money.

May I introduce the brand new www.albanygameday.com. (I have to work on the links, right now it shows all links as albanygameday.com and not the site you are looking at.)

I picked it up from godaddy.com for only a few dollars. It cost more to not let the world know my home phone number and address. They also wanted a lot of money to host it so I decided to stick with my little website host I get for free from my isp.

Any tips on neat things to do with a domain name?

 

[jaerdaph]

I hear building a Web site to point it to is kinda cool.

If you build it, they will come. Heck, I might even make the trip up the Hudson one of these days, maybe even on the Half Moon: http://www.hudsonriver.com/history/halfmoon.htm

(A good friend of mine who used to write for Ravenloft 2e, 3e and 3.5e lives in Albany and has been trying to get me to sign up for a tour of duty aboard the Half Moon.)

 

[Torm]

Does your ISP offer a static IP address?

In case you're unfamiliar with that term: When you connect to the Internet, your computer gets an IP number from the ISP that identifies your machine on the 'net during that connection. Dial-ups pretty much randomly assign them at dial-up, and most broadband connections use IP leases that expire every 24 hours or so - and when the IP lease renews, it may not be the same number, since once again, they are randomly assigned. If you have a static IP address, that means it is assigned to you - period. Which means you can do neat things like host a website from your OWN machine, or PC Anywhere into your computer from other computers without having to check to see if your IP has changed, or run an FTP server that you can use as a remotely accessible hard drive to use some of your files remotely or to let trusted people put files on there for you. And, you could run your own e-mail server with @albanygameday.com addresses. And there's other stuff, too.

Of course, the flip side is that pretty much any of that that you decide that you want to do is going to require a dedicated computer and a battery backup for it, your router, and your broadband modem, if you want to do it right....

 

[guedo79]

Road Runner (my isp) assigns an IP address randomly unless you are business class. The difference is a few hundred dollars a month(I believe). So I won't be hosting things directly on my pc. Though that does seem appealing.

At the moment, I'm masking my free website on the domain. I'm have to work on it a bit since it doesn't know when to stop masking.

 

[jaerdaph]

This company is actually pretty reasonable for Web site hosting:

http://www.freeservers.com

 

[guedo79]

They do look good. Do you use them?

 

[jaerdaph]

I do actually, for a domain (and dream) I've been sitting on:

http://www.chillingtales.com

The price is reasonable, there are lots of packages depending on what you want to do, you can always upgrade, and you can try it out for free (well, with pop-up ads it's free).

I've never had any bad experiences with them.

 

[Torm]

This company is actually pretty reasonable for Web site hosting:

http://www.freeservers.com

Seconded. I used them for two years and never had reason to complain at all - just got laid off and had to make cutbacks that included my hosting services. And now that I'm making money again, I have a static IP with BellSouth, so.....

 

[Jdvn1]

I bought a domain with a buddy of mine--splitting the cost, it's not too bad.

box51.net

 

[Tarrasque Wrangler]

I've been very happy with the service I've received from www.lunarpages.com, who host Wicked Machine for me. Approx. $8 a month for 3 gigs of webspace, 100 gigs/month transfer, unlimited MySQL databases. Pretty sweet.