[mcnichol]

If you want to be an artist then control of your intellectual property is probably a topic you care a great deal about.

Your domain and how people reach you is probably the first lever. If you are giving that up happily, I assume renting without the option to own or leasing a car is a sensible business model to you and you are just experimenting without any real intention of starting.

The effort and time in becoming an artist outweighs by at least two or three orders of magnitude the time it would take to read an article and setup a domain. Namecheap, GoDaddy, all these registrar's do it for you.

Imagine having 900 houses and renting them out to a community of like minded folks. Whether it is at cost or slightly above, it is "rent seeking" in the sense they own, you borrow.

While it isn't rented, they are squatting on it.

[karamanolev]

From my *personal* experience, the target audience, to a large degree, doesn't care at all about owning domains, websites or servers. They want something that just works and the less they have to deal with technology, the better. In that sense, a reasonable and ethical service where you own nothing is much better than one that preys on you and you still own nothing.

[mananaysiempre]

People want the thing whose functioning they are largely ignorant of to just be solved by someone else already, news at eleven.

It is, I feel, the responsibility of those who do know how these things work (e.g. us) to point out which things are important and which are safely dumped onto someone else. In this case, one’s identity on the ’net is very important, and something one should absolutely not put into position to be held for ransom later by being bundled with other services.

Do rent a hosting service, absolutely. (Do not trust it to hold the only copy of your data or metadata or social graph, but that’s usually something photographers understand implicitly, unlike e.g. writers.) Website hosting, DNS hosting, autoupload, social crossposts, whatever, buy all of that stuff as a bundle if you want—your risk threshold for redoing all of that after a hostile acquisition of your hoster is your own. But do not, under any circumstances, let them hold your identity at the same time. On the ’net, that’s your domain registration.

[mcnichol]

Domain registrar's don't prey on you.

You own the domain. You can take it and they can't withhold it.

The registrar is already doing what this site is doing. I don't have a problem with a site making it easy to setup. It's the site holding a thousand website domains.

What you are asking for is different.

If FolioHD said:

Have a domain in mind that you'd like to use? Type it here and we'll do all the work setting that up.

What they are actually doing is:

We've bought these 900~ domains and we are holding them. Pick one you'd like and we'll set it up.