August 2009 Archives

Yahoo's Geocities service is about to close in 2 months and it's getting time to look for an alternative, if you haven't already done it. Today we'd like to recommend both some free and paid services for hosting your own website.

But let's start with one basic thing first and that's your own domain name. A domain should be the foundation for every website because, compared to an internet address like geocities.com/yourwebsite, you have full ownership and control over it. This gives you the advantage of being able to switch to another website hosting service if you become dissatisfied with features, price or customer support.

By seperating the three elements website hosting, email and domain registration you can even further minimise the risk of being caught in another Geocities-like incident. In such a case you simply have to point your domain name to a new hosting service whilst still retaining the same overall branding and email address. Our Domains For Apps offering can help you to achieve this 3-way setup.

The following 20 services make building a website, blog or community easy. It's worth to take your time and compare their features and prices to find the tool that's best suited for you.

Hosted Website Services For Your Own Domain

We help you to configure custom domains for the following services from your iWantMyName account:

1. Build websites online

• Google Sites - Create free websites and wikis. Google Sites is part of the Google Apps Suite which also lets you use free email on your domain with Gmail.
• MobileMe - Websites are built with Apple's iWeb and can be easily uploaded to MobileMe. You can choose from a variety of themes and also create a blog using iWeb.
  
• Squarespace - Popular online website builder service. Make websites, a blog or portfolio. Also offers an iPhone app.
  
• Weebly - Drag and Drop sitebuilder to publish text, videos, pictures, maps, etc. Additional blogging features included.
  
• Yola - Create a site for small businesses, groups, non-profits or personal use with Yola's intuitive online editor.
• Ning - Build a social network with members. They can have their own profile page, add photos and videos or write a blog. Available in 18 languages.

2. Make a Flash website

• Moonfruit - Easily build Flash sites using the Moonfruit sitemaker tool with WYSIWYG features and social network integration for Twitter & Facebook.
• Wix - Professional Flash website editor. Choose from hundreds of free Flash templates, no technical skills required.
  

3. Start your own blog

• Blogger - Free blog service to post articles, thoughts, photos and videos. Blogger just celebrated its 10th birthday and is available in more than 40 languages.
• Posterous - The newcomer. Just send an email to Posterous which is turned into a blog post and automatically shared to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and more.
  
• Soup.io - Free tumblelog services to share links, quotes, video, audio, files etc. Soup.io is completely customisable and perfect for a mini-blog or lifestream.
  
• Tumblr - Tumblr is another easy way to blog that lets you use a custom domain. Share your online life from your browser, iPhone, desktop or email.
• Typepad - Professional blog hosting for businesses, journalists and writers from renowned Six Apart.

Other Website Builders With Custom Domain Option

• Jimdo - Another comprehensive and easy to use website creator. Jimdo also offers a special import feature for all Geocities customers.
• Wordpress.com - Hosted version of the popular Wordpress blogging software. Many free templates are available for personal and business websites.
  
• Viviti - Build a unique website for small businesses, bloggers and web designers. No code and no hassle. That's how we like it.
  
• SnapPages - Online website creation tool for the rest of us with drag-and-drop simplicity. Looks very easy and Apple-like.
• Tank - Clean and simple webpage creator. It is aimed at people who want beautiful sites that just work. Build anything, anywhere, anytime.
• Webstarts - Create a professional online presence. Add Flash files, slideshows, music, images, widgets, ecommerce tools and more.
  
• Webs - Webpage creator for personal sites, groups and businesses. Offers a variety of layous and also has built-in community features such as forums and an event organiser.

We hope you enjoyed this article. If you don't have a domain yet you should check out our domain search and register your web address now.

Now you can not only publish status updates for Twitter or Facebook in a cool way but also register very unique domain names. So why not astonish your friends with an upside down domain of your first name? Our fun domain name generator FlipMyName makes this possible. Just enter your name and you'll be presented with a flipped version.

Available first names under .COM

• Tim - ʇıɯ.com
• James - ɾɐɯǝs.com
• Mark - ʞɹɐɯ.com
• John - uɥoɾ.com

It's fun for sharing links on Twitter, Facebook or in your email and forum footer. You could also create your own URL shortener with it. The technology behind this is around for years by the way. Domains are registered as IDNs (Internationalised Domain Names) and are accessible by any modern browser.

The sudden shutdown of popular URL shortener tr.im was already covered by the main tech blogs so we won't go into further details on the business side. In short the main problem resulting from this are the broken links someday and there's only one solution how you can prevent this in the future: run your own URL shortener.

Again, it all comes down to owning your namespace as discussed earlier with Facebook's username landrush. You are only able to fully control what's happening with your links if you own the domain name and run your own URL shortener on it. Anybody who's considering Twitter as an important part of their business or personal brand should start thinking about customising their short URLs now (also see our domain hack examples how they are used to create short links).

We have compiled a list of hosted services, scripts and plugins that make running your custom URL shortener possible:

Hosted URL shortening services with custom domain

• awe.sm - A custom URL shortener with API. detailed analytics, uptime guarantee and SLAs. According to their website you can take your data with you anytime.
• Tinyarro.ws - Use a custom domain with Tinyarro.ws' tiny links service. As their own service uses the ➡.ws domain you should also be able to use IDNs.
  
• budurl - The budurl Enterprise edition offer the possibility to use your own domain. Their dashboard provides extensive analytics and real-time stats.
  
• XR.COM - This free service is a basic URL shortening tool. If you don't need analytics and just want to shorten links XR.COM might be the right choice.
  
• Google Short Links - Google runs a URL shortener as part of Google Apps For Your Domain. It's a Labs feature but can simply be added to your dashboard.
  
• Peashoot - Manage social media campaigns with your own short URLs. If you want to grow your audience and haven't yet heard of Peashoot you've missed a great app.
• su.pr - StumbleUpon's own URL shortener drives traffic to your site can be used with a custom domain too. You need to install a small script or use Wordpress though.

Run a URL shortener on your own machine

• YOURLS PHP script - Small set of script to shorten links using a classic PHP and MySQL setup. Also offers an API and a Wordpress plugin.
  
• Short URL Wordpress Plugin - Create short URLs with this Wordpress plugin. Offers basic analytics and requires Wordpress 2.5 or higher.
  
• Movable Type script - Paul Roub's script to create a self-hosted URL shortener for the Movable Type blog software. You need some technical knowledge for this.
  

Other resources

If you don't have a short domain you should check out our list of ultra short and brandable domain names.

We have received a lot of positive feedback in the local community about our recent announcement for Internationalised Domain Names with Māori macrons. A question we were asked quite often was how you can actually enter special characters on an English keyboard layout. While most operating systems have character tables to help you entering letters of foreign alphabets, we now have an easier alternative for you online.

The Virtual Keyboard allows you to choose from different non-English keyboard layouts. You just need to change the respective language and can start typing in Chinese, Japanese, Greek or Hebrew. Unfortunately it doesn't support one of our favourite languages but Klingon still hasn't made it into the official UTF-8 standard... ;)

Here's an example using Russian:

IDN Punycode Converter

Another little domain tool for IDNs is our IDN Punycode converter. All Internationalised Domain Names are converted into ASCII characters using Punycode to make them readable in the Domain Name System (DNS). So instead of the domain müller.com, computers actually read xn--mller-kva.com. The tool might be helpful to find out the ASCII syntax of an IDN. Check out the IDN Punycode converter here.