From: John Smith 
Newsgroups: alt.websites uk.legal uk.finance uk.business.accountancy
Subject: Re: Average Price of UK website designed?
Date: Thu, 07 Aug 2003 10:02:26 +0100


 post@jpointon.co.uk (John Pointon) wrote:

>A virtual domain is in fact a subfolder on a domain and uses the
>domain's address as its identifier with a username added. eg
>wwww.website.tiscali,co.uk/~avtax (which is an ancient site I used to
>maintain but do so no longer).
>
>Most free web space from ISPs is in this format.

My belief is that you got this the wrong way round.

A virtual domain, a term perhaps not used much in the trade, is e.g.

 www.john-smith.co.uk

and this is what you DO want, for a business especially, whereas a
el-cheapo domain is the one with the ISP name in it e.g.

 www.freeserve.com/john-smith

The point I was making re this is simply that there is no point in
paying extra to an ISP who is willing to host 

 www.john-smith.co.uk

(who historically always charged extra for their web hosting) when you
can get the same end result with a www redirection service (which you
pay for, say £10/year) and a website knocked up in some free webspace
e.g. at Freeserve, or within your own ISP's webspace.