You Need Your Own Website

When I meet someone, I tell him to contact me at karlrockwell.com. We don't need to pull out phones, business cards, or write anything down. I can change addresses, phone numbers, and any communication channels without broadcasting it to everybody. People can conveniently find the communication channels we use in common. I am not hostage to any platform or company.

Remember the white pages where everyone's address and phone number was listed in the big white book? Now people's addresses and detailed personal information are stored in thousands of corporate and government databases, but friends cannot find each other unless they go onto one of these big tech websites and have their social graph and communication monitored. Having your own web site resolves this.

Own your identity and communications rather than be captive to platforms.

How to Create Your Own Website

1. Buying your own domain you control such as yourname.me gives you the most control and flexibility. It can also be used as your email and social media domain. You can find domains available to purchase at https://porkbun.com/, https://www.gandi.net/,  https://www.hover.com/, or another domain registrar.
2. Then you need to decide where to host your website:
   1. You can point/redirect your domain to a page such as a linkstack or neocities page. 
   2. You could host from your house if you have some kind of computer to use as a server. You will need a little technical aptitude and the patience to learn some things, but you will have the most control and own rather than rent your hardware. Checkout https://yunohost.org if you want to do that.
   3. You can rent a VPS (Virtual Private Server) from a provider such as https://www.hetzner.com/, https://vultr.com/, or https://www.digitalocean.com/. It is easier to set up and maintain a VPS than run a server at home, but you will pay rent based on the resources you need. You can pay only about $5 a month for most basic websites.
   4. You might be lucky to know someone already hosting a server and willing to host your site. He might not charge you anything and take care of all the administration as a favor. ;)
3. Pick the software to run your site on. This site runs on free Bludit, but you have many options.
4. Create your content any way you want.

If you want any help, set up a meeting on my calendar.