Scripting News: "If I were going to launch a competitor to FeedBurner, here's how I'd do it. First, I'd either do a deal with a registrar, become a registrar, or merge or partner with one. It's absolutely essential that the user own the domain that their feed is hosted at, so that, in case of emergency, they can switch to a different hosting service. If they don't own the domain, it doesn't matter how many promises the vendor makes, or how well-intentioned they are, an act of god could result in a blackout of a huge portion of the RSS network. It's irresponsible to host a large percentage of the net's RSS feeds at one domain. I would set it up so it's the other way around. My hosting service won't host your feed unless you own the domain....."

That advice doesn't just apply to RSS services, it's a good rule of thumb for e-mail, hosting, blogging....you name it. When you have your own domain name, you avoid a lot of "lock-in" from various service providers.

In the early days of ICANN, ISPs were very open about why they opposed new top-level domains, especially those that might be marketed to end-sers: they were afraid that if everyone had their own domain name, users might actually be able to switch to a new service provider. Without a domain name, one of the switching costs is having to tell everyone in your address book that you have a new address. Add blogging to the mix, and you also have to hope that the search engines catch up to your new address as well.