Your Address Is Your Domain

By John Hardy
January 12, 2026 | Series: openweb

When you publish on a platform, you are borrowing an address. Your writing lives under someone else’s name on someone else’s domain, and it stays there only as long as that company allows. You can share the link, but you do not control the address it points to.

Publishing on someone else’s domain is like working on someone else’s plantation. You may do the labour and produce the value, and you may be visible while you are useful. Someone else owns the ground beneath your work and decides what stays or goes, along with what it allows to exist.

Owning a domain changes that relationship in practice. It gives you your own name on the internet and a place where your writing is not conditional on a platform’s rules. Hosting providers and publishing tools can change, but the address that holds your work remains under your control.

That matters because URLs are promises about where something can be found. When you publish a page, you are telling the world that something lives at a particular location. If that location belongs to someone else, the promise belongs to them. If you own the domain, the promise is yours to keep.

That is why self-publishing on your own domain is about freedom as much as technology. A site on an address you control cannot be quietly erased or buried, and another party cannot reshape it. It becomes a place where your writing can exist on its own terms and persist for as long as you decide it should. I want you to own the address before you build the house.

Tags: web, selfpublishing, domains