Do you need your own domain?
Added at 15:55 on 15 May 2024
Since we started building websites for councils in 2005 we've hosted many parish council sites in subfolders of one of our own domains, like parish-council.com.
There are a couple of reasons why we would strongly recommend that councils have their own domains nowadays though.
Firstly, it gives you control of your website - if you ever want to move providers, for example away from us to a local web design company, you're less easily able to do so. You can't 'move' our website address.
But secondly, and much more importantly, it's becoming essential for councils to have control of their councillors' email addresses. The past practice of allowing parish and community councillors to use their own personal email addresses (eg hotmail, aol) for council business really is no longer tenable. GDPR and FOI considerations mean that the clerk to the council must have control of the email addresses used by councillors in order to fulfil their obligations.
You can only really do that if you own your own domain. Most domain registrars will provide email services at a cost, or if you have lots of money to spend, systems like Gmail and Office 365 can also give you emails on your own domain.
We can register a domain for you at £30 per annum including VAT for most domain suffixes, but you're more than welcome to register one elsewhere and point it at our server.