
Ask HN: Medium charges $75 for pointing the blog to my existing domain? - sidcool
I was under the impression that Medium lets you point to a custom domain if you already own the domain.  But I contacted support and they say that a one time $75 payment is mandatory.<p>Same goes for Wordpress.  They charge $99 per year even if you own a domain.  Is this something common?  I have talked to people who say they use these features for free, as the domain is already owned.  Any ideas?
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anmolparashar
Hey, I have two Medium blogs that point to my custom domain. They didn't
charge me any money, and in fact the Support guy went above and beyond to help
me the issues I was having with my domain name provider. But, I see now they
are charging $75 for it and I'm a bit taken back.

If all you need is a blog, might I suggest Tumblr? They (as long as I
remember) don't charge you a thing. You won't get an SSL certificate though.

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user5994461
Yes, it's extremely common. Pay to have your own domain and remove the
wordpress/medium branding.

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sidcool
In spite of the fact that I already own and have paid for the domain with
Namecheap?

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ballenf
Think of it as a one-time license fee to white label the Medium tech. Pretty
cheap, imo. Surprised they didn't make it a recurring fee, tbh.

Out of curiosity, what benefit do you see getting from having the content be
on your own domain vs. Medium itself?

It's probably just me being quirky, but when I'm reading a Medium article on
someone's custom domain, I get slightly annoyed that it's a little harder to
get back to Medium itself to get to the rest of my reading list.

If you decide against paying the fee, I doubt I'm alone in saying that I don't
judge the content itself on whether it's on medium.com vs.
randomtechguymusings.*.

Publish good, thoughtful, valuable content and your work will speak for itself
regardless of domain name.

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user5994461
It's fun you'd say that because there are quite a few discussion on HN saying
they don't read medium.com domains anymore. The articles are too low quality.

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gorer
They are elitists, or they think they are :) and trying how far they can go.
And people here adore them.

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dazc
Not sure what the case is with Medium but with Wordpress you are better off
hosting it yourself so you have full control of everything.

$99 a year seems excessive but, I guess, for those uncomfortable with self-
hosting it may be worth it?

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sp332
I wouldn't recommend running your own WordPress unless you're willing to
update plugins on a moment's notice. Lots of plugins have security holes and
once an exploit is in the wild, mass hacks of WordPress blogs are very common.
If WordPress hosts it for you, they will close the holes much faster than you
can.

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mrbill
It's quite easy to install a plugin that will auto-update all of your plugins
for you, and WordPress itself auto-updates by default now.

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newsat13
If you are looking at custom domain + self-hosting, I suggest looking into
cloudron.io. They have wordpress as an app (but I recommend looking into Ghost
as well).

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amerkhalid
I was just trying out WordPress.com's personal plan, it was only 36$ a year
for hosting and pointing my domain (which is I registered on Namecheap).

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sidcool
Does it come with SSL?

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amerkhalid
Yup builtin in SSL.

BTW I cancelled the plan because they didn't let me customize permalinks. I
was moving an existing blog to WordPress.com, so it was important to preserve
links structure.

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paulcole
Why not just 301?

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amerkhalid
There is no way to upload your own .htaccess file on WordPress.com. I didn't
really look deep enough into it. The most of info about setting up redirects
were for self-hosted WordPress.

But I gave up quickly because self-hosted blogs are working fine. (And there
really isn't that much extra work in keeping those blogs secure and up to
date.)

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paulcole
oh duh, I didn't consider that. I've had similar problems on squarespace with
no way to edit the robots.txt file.

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snackai
They don't charge you for the domain itself but for some part of their
service. What's so hard to get about this?

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Grue3
Tumblr on custom domain is free, I think.

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sidcool
This post was removed by mods. It's cool. I got my answers. Thanks everyone.

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manojlds
I think doing so on Heroku was costly as well.

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mrkurt
It's actually a relatively difficult thing to bolt on to some apps, their
custom domain setup is not very easy.

(shameless plug)

We let you put custom hostnames + ssl in front of hosted apps, we have a
really early attempt at a medium one in progress. If you'd like to try it,
send me an email at kurt@fly.io

(/shameless plug)

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dirktheman
You may own the domain, but you still have to find some way to store the files
and serve the necessary bandwidth. That's why you have to pay extra. However,
$75 or $99 is excessive. Hostgator charges less than 3 bucks a month, you'd be
much better off with a small shared hosting like that.

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masukomi
um... medium hosts the files and handles the necessary bandwidth already.
Adding a custom domain doesn't change that at all. I don't disagree that you'd
be better off with other sites but those are NOT the reasons it costs $75

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Chaebixi
I think custom domains are a tool for price segmentation* (like a student
discount). Medium and Wordpress want offer a free product (for
marketing/network effects), but also have their higher-end users pay. They do
that by limiting a few features their higher-end users need to the premium
product to force them to buy. In this case, it's custom domain that lets you
look more professional.

You see this with email too. Want to use your own domain and look like a real
business (vs. some dude with small-time aspirational business-hobby run off of
gmail)? Then you pay $5 a month or spend your time being a sysadmin.

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination)

