If you make erotica and market it online, you're constantly at risk of having social media accounts suspended or shut down, especially if your stuff is queer. Patreon will just straight up close your account if they decide you have broken their secret rules. So will Twitter and basically any other social media platform. If you make anything slightly kinky, you're always at some risk of having an account closed without warning, often because of false reports from folks with political motivations. When your account closes, even a dedicated fan might have trouble tracking you down again.
The best solution to this problem is to have a domain name of your own, even if you don't have a website of your own. It's cheap (easily between $10-30 per year if you're not too picky), and you don't need to know a bunch of technical stuff to use it.
I see a lot of porn art that's signed with a social media handle like @phanes. What if your account gets closed? People won't know to search for @phanes1 or whatever your new handle is. What if (goddess forbid) Cohost goes under? If it's a Twitter handle, what if (goddess willing) Twitter finally implodes?
I put phanes.me on all my stuff. That's the address of my update blog, which basically no one ever visits. But if my Patreon gets closed, phanes.me will still work. If my web host decides to shut my blog down, I can just point phanes.me at my Itch page or pretty much anywhere else. I won't lose control of the domain itself unless I do something super criminal.
Here are the basic steps to set up a cheap domain if you don't want to pay for your own entire webserver:
- Pick the address you want visitors to be sent to (e.g. https://phanes.itch.io)
- Buy a domain name (e.g. phanes.me)
- Set up a redirect with your registrar,1 pointing at your target address.
1. Pick a target address.
First, you should pick where you want your visitors to go. I'm assuming you don't have your own website that you own, but if you're a working creative, you probably have somewhere with your stuff. For example, my work currently lives at https://phanes.itch.io/. You could point to Gumroad or Cohost or anywhere else on the web.2
This isn't a permanent decision. If your account gets suspended or the host goes out of business, you can just pick a different one and you'll be back on the web in about half an hour.
Let's say I want to direct people to
2. Buy a domain name.
Next, buy your domain name from a legit registrar. It doesn't really matter which one, as long as it's on the list of ICANN accredited registrars and supports 301/302 redirects at no hosting cost. I recommend Namecheap, but feel free to leave a comment if you have a different recommendation.
Search for the name you want, like "phanes" (this is the SLD, which goes before the dot) and you'll probably get a bunch of options for the TLD, like "me" or "space" (the 2+ letters after the dot) with a wide array of prices. The TLD doesn't matter from a technical perspective; it's mostly a matter of price and vibes.
If your domain name is too common, it might be taken on most TLDs. You could pick a more obscure TLD, like ".art," or you could pick a different name, like "phanesgames" instead of "phanes."
You'll almost always pay by the year, with the first year discounted. Make sure that the renewal price is still inside your budget. For our purposes, pick the free DNS option and don't bother with "hosting" or any other fancy addons except WHOIS protection. All you really need is the domain (and a nameserver, which basically always comes with the domain).
I do recommend getting basic WHOIS or "privacy" protection to protect your personal information; Namecheap and many other registrars include this for free. Without it, you may expose your personal information to the whole internet.
Once you're done, you'll have a domain like phanes.me.
3. Set up the redirect.
Once you have a domain and a place to point it to, you want to set up the redirect. Log into your registrar's account page and look for a URL redirect option. It might be under a "manage" link for your domain. Your source URL will be the domain you bought (phanes.me). The destination URL will be the target site, such as phanes.itch.io. If it asks what kind of redirect you want, pick "301." Namecheap has a simple guide for doing this on their support site.
Wait 30 minutes or so for this information to get spread across the internet. When it has, you'll be able to visit your domain (phanes.me) and it will send you to the the target site (phanes.itch.io). Congratulations!
If the target site ever suspends your account or shuts down, just go into your registrar's management page again and change the destination of the redirect. You're all set! And if someday you want to have a proper website you control, you can just the same domain name there.
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If you know what you're doing, you can have your DNS/hosting handled by someone other than your registrar, but that is slightly more complicated. I'm writing this for someone with very little sysadmin experience.
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For the more technically-minded: this guide is intended to be as simple as possible. I considered giving instructions for using CNAME or ALIAS records, but they are all a bit more complicated to use properly.