WHAT AM I OFFERING?

I am offering havilands.com subdomain pointers exclusively to people who were born with the name Haviland or who are married to someone born with the name Haviland. Suppose your name is Ben Haviland and you have a home page or business at a hard-to-remember URL like this:

http://someLongISP.org/homepages/surnames/html/~benhaviland.html

I can make the following URL point to the above one:

http://ben.havilands.com

If I already have a Ben in my link list, I can make it benjamin.havilands.com, or whatever-you-want.havilands.com as long as it isn't vulgar.

And that's not all...

I can give you up to 10 email aliases for free. For instance, if your email address is bhaviland@someLongISP.org I can give you family@ben.havilands.com, which is a little easier to remember. All email sent to family@ben.havilands.com would simply redirect itself to bhaviland@someLongISP.org, and if you want you could change the reply-to email address in your email program so that your outgoing email had "family@ben.havilands.com" in the reply address field. Nobody would know the difference.

You could use these email aliases to filter junk mail too. You know when you sign up for services on the web you always have to give them your email address? That's a dangerous thing to do, because many companies will spam you (send you tons of junk email), or else they will put your email address in their database and then sell it to other companies who will spam you. They can post privacy notices all they want, it doesn't matter, even with a legitimate company. These days companies are buying and selling each other a lot, and when these databases exchange hands the new company often doesn't honor (or even know about) the promises of the previous company. So, get yourself an alias like misc1@ben.havilands.com and give that to services on the web instead. I can point it to any email address you want - even your original one (bhaviland@someLongISP.org). But if you start getting spammed at that address, just tell me to change the alias to misc2@ben.havilands.com and all that junk mail going to misc1 will bounce back to the sender. You just have to keep track of which sites you want to keep a current email address at and change them accordingly.

Finally, I will link to benjamin.havilands.com from the havilands.com main page, which will filter some traffic to you. You do not have to move your web site, because I'm not offering a web hosting service. I'm offering a DNS service (Domain Name Server) which simply maps a name (ben.havilands.com) to a server (your home page).

If you do move your home page, you won't have to tell everyone your new address. You just have to tell me! I will change the pointer to ben.havilands.com to your new home page as soon as I get your email (usually this takes just seconds, but give me 48 hours notice if you can).

WHAT'S THE CATCH?

Well aside from the restrictions (below) there aren't any. How can I do this for free? Well, frankly, because it doesn't cost me any money to do it. I own the havilands.com domain and I use a free DNS service to manage it. The time involved in administration for you is extremely small. It's a win-win situation - I can build traffic to havilands.com and you can build traffic to your web site.

There are two very small caveats.

1) I can't gaurantee this will always be a free service. At the present time it's free and I have absolutely no plans on charging Havilands for it in the future. However, suppose the free DNS service I use suddenly starts to charge me? Then I have a problem, and if that were to happen I'd discuss the situation with my clients. But I wouldn't worry about it. Perhaps I could switch to another free DNS service. There's more than one way to skin a cat.

2) It is possible that the subdomain would slow down visitors to your web page or your email - but by a very small degree. Probably it will be unnoticeable. The reason is because the traffic would have to hop through my DNS servers first before going to your servers. The DNS service I use has 4 redundant name servers, which is very good. Your web host probably only has 2, or at most 3. But please do not assume that every time your email is slow it is because of the havilands.com subdomain pointer. Almost all of the time this will not be the case. If you do feel the havilands.com subdomain is slowing down an email, try having someone send an email directly to your original address and see if it's any faster.

RESTRICTIONS

Your surname, married name or maiden name must be Haviland, Havilland, or De Havilland. I'm not going to look at your ID for proof or anything, I'll take your word for it. If your web site reflects the Haviland name in some way, all the better.

I will not provide subdomains to pornographic or other vulgar sites. I reserve the right to refuse any request, and I have a right to cancel a subdomain if I feel it's necessary. (I will notify you in email that I am doing so.)

You can have one havilands.com subdomain pointer and up to 10 subdomain email aliases per household.

CONTACT

If you agree to all the above terms and would like a havilands.com subdomain pointer, or if you have questions, email me.