Before you ask me... (why I redirect my .uk to my .com)

It's been pointed out to me by one or two people involved the UK domain name industry, who I am also good friends with, that I should think about the fact that my davidthornton.uk domain name is configured to redirect to my davidthornton.com domain name. I'd actually thought about this before it was mentioned to me but I don't consider it to be in any way a problem or a demonstration of any lack of my faith in the .uk namespace. People who might suggest that are being silly, in my opinion. Redirects are nothing new. They're normal!

My intention has always been to promote my commercial relationship with Nominet using my davidthornton.uk domain name on any material or literature I published in relation to it. I did this in 2018 and I am doing so again in 2021.

I am also the registrant of the matching davidthornton domain name under the three SLDs of .co.uk/.org.uk/me.uk too. All three domain names actively HTTP 301 redirect to this web site so they are all resolving and considered in use. I pay the annual renewal fee for each of them which obviously benefits the registry.

I decided to configure using my .com domain name because my personal web site is not only intended to solely host content aimed at a UK focused audience. On that basis I felt that my use of davidthornton.com, which was also the very first domain name I ever registered, seemed the most appropriate choice as the base domain name for now. It is entirely possible that I might spliy the site out into multiple sites or modify some of the HTTP redirects to  resolve to subpages of the same web site, but at the moment I am confident that using a HTTP 301 redirect with these domain names isn't in anyway a demonstration of me being disloyal or unsupportive of the .uk namespace product! What I am doing is done by plenty of others online. We all still pay our renewal fees and I choose to advertise the .uk's where I feel they are appropriately relevant.

I happen to be the registant of davidthornton.com.br given I am a resident of Brazil and that domain name also HTTP 301 redirects here too. Likewise I have paid the R$40 annual renewal fee to the .br registry for the privilege of using it.

I could obviously spend what I estimate would take 5 minutes to modify the zone files for the respective domain names at my DNS provider and also change the domain name here at the SaaS host where I am blogging from. Currently I don't see the benefit, other than what domain name appears in browser address bars,  warranting this.

I hope after reading this you'll agree that registering and operating multiple domain names across ccTLD's and a gTLD in the way that I have configured has very little bearing on what I actually have to say. I still support the flourishment of the .uk namespace product.