The answer is to use a free domain forwarding service. These services offer some of the benifits of owning your own domain, but without the cost.
Here’s how it works. Let’s say your website has a long, hard to remember address, such as http://www.hostingsite.com/personal/home/smithwebsite/. If you use a domain forwarding service, a visitor can type something like www.smithweb.cjb.net and be automatically routed to your website. Another benefit is that if you move your site to another hosting service, the domain forwarding service can simply send people to your new location; your shortened URL remains the same.
Using these services is a no-brainer. Signup, tell the service what the front of the domain should be (such as “smithweb”), and it generates the last part (such as “cjb.net”). Send your brand new (and shorter) URL to the people you want to visit your site. There are a number of domain forwarding services, including www.webalias.com, www.cjb.net which are free. Before signing up, check the terms of service. Will visitors to your site be barraged by ads? Will you have to put an ad banner or pop-up ads on your site pointing to the forwarding service? The terms vary according to service.
Don’t want to fuss with a domain forwarding service? Consider using www.snipurl.com or www.tinyurl.com. They shrink any URL, no matter how long, to a manageable length, so that you can easily send your web site address to others via email.
