When would it make sense for someone to get a domain name?

Like, yesterday? I own my domain since like 20 years ago...

At very least get it for your email, it can be hosted by proton or any other of many mail providers, on your domain.

If you self host, its mandatory, I think, to have one!!!

Whenever you want one! They're not too expensive, between $12-$19 a year depending where you register it. I have a few I got just cause I thought it was a great name and maybe would do something with it some day.

For example: Iguanayawn.com

Hope it's not against any rules to "market" or whatever, but I run a web hosting company, Genlack.com. Check it out if you decide to get a website up. We'd love to help you out! It's just me and my dad, but we have 50 happy clients and you can host your own emails easy peasy.

When you realize you want full control over how your services are labeled.

For a lot of stuff, I just use dynamic DNS. But for email, you really need your own domain, although you can get a service to host it.

But if you want multihoming, DDoS protection, or DNS-layer redirecting or dynamic subdomains of your own, or a guarantee that the domain won’t vanish out from under you, you need your own domain.

Only makes sense if you plan on using it. For private use for example for email, or a small website, blog, portfolio, linktree, whatever. It's not expensive, though. Less than $10 a year depending on top-level domain and provider.

So you could move email providers whenever.

Example: Proton CEO Twitter Debacle

If you need to maintain any sort of public presence for private or professional purposes, having your own website and domain puts you in control over your own content. I see mine partly as a platform to instantly publish whatever I feel like, partly as a fun thing to tinker with, and partly as a LinkedIn alternative where people look me up online and I'm in control over what they see and which cookies they have to accept (none).

When you want people to go to your website.

Get one right now before someone else gets it from under you.

One benefit is to obtain SSL certificates using Let's Encrypt or similar, which is nice to have even if you're only hosting services on a LAN/VPN, to avoid certificate warnings (and to benefit from using a reverse proxy). You can use self-signed certificates, but this is annoying in its own right.

You technically don't need to buy a domain for this since you can use a free DNS provider, but you can use shorter names and sometimes there are cases where you might need to switch DNS providers, in which case you have to change that domain everywhere, which is quite disruptive. If you own your domain, you take it with you when switching DNS providers.

when you want a cool bluesky handle

If you're self hosting services on your own network it's often easier to use a domain rather than have to keep up with home IP address changes. Same if you need to set up some sort of remote access into your network.

Also useful for email, you'll have infinite amount of email addresses you can use on your own domain. Plus if you ever need to migrate to another email provider you simply point your domain to your new email provider, you never lose your email address this way.

There is also social media that you can use your own domain to show you own your account. e.g. seems to be common at Bluesky.

I got one for my son when he was a couple years old. This was almost 30 years ago. He hasn't done much with it, I don't know if he ever will, but it's pretty handy for like hosting the family's email, throwing up shit to share with family/friends, etc.. I could do without it, but it's really cheap to maintain and I like controlling my own data.

I got one recently to host Minecraft and Jellyfin!

I had one for a while as a teenager just because it was cheap and I had a website. That was ages ago though. Idk what registering a domain name is like in 2025. It probably sucks, just like everything else tho.