Your own domain as a musician: how to choose it and connect it

Your web address ends up in more places than you might think. It goes on the poster, you say it into the mic at the end of the set, and it sits under your name in every email you send to a venue. Of all your addresses, your own domain is the only one that stays yours for as long as you renew it. It doesn't depend on a social network or on the platform that runs your site today. If you switch services one day, the domain moves with you, and every link you have already handed out keeps working.

Before you buy one, it helps to know a few things: how to choose the name and the ending, where to buy it, how to keep it, and what happens when you connect it to your site. You don't need any jargon for that.

Which name

Start with the obvious choice, because it is usually the best one: your stage name or the band's, spelled exactly as it appears on posters. If someone already has it, add a word that describes you and won't change over time: your instrument, or music, trio or band. Leave out the name of a record or a tour, unless the site exists only for that project.

Then say it over the phone. If you have to spell it, mention a hyphen or explain that the four is a digit, the name will go wrong every time someone writes it down by ear.

Accents and letters like ñ cause the same kind of trouble. You can register domains with those characters, but many people will type the plain letters and land somewhere else. Buy the version without them.

Which ending

The ending is the part after the dot. These are the usual ones:

• .com is what people type out of habit. If it is free with your name, it is the safe bet.
• Country endings (.co.uk, .fr, .de and the rest) say where you are. They make sense if most of your work happens in one country, though some come with registration requirements.
• .cat is for the Catalan language and culture, and you need a link to them to register one.
• Newer endings (.band, .live and many more) help when the name you want is taken elsewhere.

Look at the renewal price before you choose, and not only the first year. Many endings cost little the first year and a good deal more after that. If you can, also register the version people are likely to mistype and point it to the main one.

Where to buy it

You buy domains from a registrar, a company authorised to register them in your name. There are many of them and they all sell the same thing. What changes is the price, how clear the control panel is and how they treat you. Check four things before you pay: the renewal price; whether privacy protection is included, so your personal details stay out of the public domain register; whether the panel for editing DNS records is easy to find; and whether you can move the domain to another registrar without obstacles.

What matters most is whose name goes on it. Buy it yourself, in your name, with your email. A domain is often registered by the designer who built the site, by a band member who has since left or by an agency, and years later nobody can get into it. If someone manages yours, ask them to make you the owner. Check domains that come "free" with hosting the same way: whose name are they in, and what happens to them if you leave?

Renewing and keeping it

You rent a domain one year at a time. If nobody renews it, it becomes free after a grace period and anyone can register it, including someone who wants to sell it back to you. This happens more often than you'd think, and nearly always for a dull reason: a card that expired, or a reminder sent to an inbox nobody reads.

1. The day you buy itTurn on automatic renewal and set a contact email you read every day.
2. If you canPay for several years at once: one reminder fewer.
3. When your card changesUpdate it at the registrar too, not only in your subscriptions.
4. When your email changesChange the domain contact before you close the old address.
5. Once a yearLog in to the panel and check the expiry date.

Email on your domain

A message to a venue from yourname at yourdomain looks more professional than one from a generic account. Email is a separate service from the site. You sign up with an email provider, and it tells you which records to add to your domain. Those records, called MX, say where your mail goes, and they can sit next to your site's records without any conflict. If you only need to receive mail, many registrars offer simple forwarding to the inbox you already use.

The provider will also ask for a few text records that prove the mail you send really comes from you. Add them. Without them your messages are more likely to land in spam, the last place you want a booking email to end up. How to write that email is in the booking email that gets replies.

What connecting it means

Buying the domain is only half the job. The domain still has to know where your site lives, and that is what DNS is for: think of it as the domain's address book. Each line in it is a record, and each record says where one thing lives: the site, the email, a verification.

A site usually needs two:

• An A record for the bare domain (yourdomain.com), pointing to the numeric address of the server that runs your site.
• A CNAME record for the www version, pointing to another name instead of a number.

Sometimes the service that runs your site also asks for a TXT record, a line of text that proves the domain is yours before it gets connected.

DNS changes take a while to show everywhere. Usually it is a few minutes, but it can take up to 24 hours. Once the domain points to your site, the service issues a certificate. That is what puts https at the start of the address and the padlock in the browser. Without one, browsers warn visitors that the page is not secure.

Mistakes worth avoiding

The most expensive mistake is losing the domain because a renewal failed. The most common is deleting every record while connecting the site and then going days without email. Two more come up often. One is leaving two sites up with the same content, the old one and the new one, which confuses search engines and people alike. The other is changing domain every few years: each change leaves broken links on posters, in interviews and on festival pages. If you do change, point the old domain to the new one, and keep it pointed there for a long time.

In Pages

On the Free plan, your site gets its own address on Pages, like yourname.page.tjp.app. On Pro and Max you can connect your own domain. In Studio you enter it and press Connect domain. Studio then shows you a TXT record that proves the domain is yours, plus the two records for your site, an A for the domain and a CNAME for www, each ready to copy. Once you have added them at your registrar, press Check connection. The certificate is issued automatically. Until the domain is connected, your site keeps answering at its Pages address, and Health reminds you there is a step left.

The domain is yours, and so is your data: you can download your whole account as one file whenever you like. To see what else your site needs before that address goes on a poster, read what a musician website needs.

Your domain

yourname.page.tjp.app

yourname.com

Your data

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