How good is your email? Is it what you expected when you signed up?

Are you concerned that your ISP may be trying to charge you extra for what used to be free? Are you really happy about advertising being included as part of your personal emails?

The world has changed a lot since the first "free" email providers started up a couple of years ago, not just in the UK. The chances are that your email demands have changed with it.

Some time ago, I realised if my email address "collapsed", my (largely digital) business could be in serious trouble. If my free ISP went out of business or was sold to a giant corporation, my mail address could vanish into oblivion with it.

Many people used my email address every day. It was a very nice address, as the estate agents say. If the address just died, then I was worried that all my precious mail would vanish into the ether and nobody would know what had happened.

Some would be very upset I had not replied to their emails. Others would simply conclude that is the way of the digital world. People change jobs, lose their email identity and are never heard of again.

This was simply not good enough. So I decided to make the email bomb-proof by registering my own domain name, www.hatley.co.uk and having all my email addressed to a place I could control.

Obvious stuff. But there are hundreds of thousands of people who do not realise what owning their own domain could do for them.

My father, for example, has just written an extremely well- researched book on our family history. He wants to use hatley.co.uk as a place to site a web site to tell people around the world with the same surname as us about his work. We are working on ideas for the web site and hope to have something in place later this year. My father has also taken advantage of his son's foresight to acquire a personalised hatley.co.uk email address for himself. All his email is now automatically forwarded from hatley.co.uk to his long-standing free access account with www. waitrose.com He simply dials into the waitrose.com email account and picks up his mail as usual. But, if anything ever happened to waitrose.com, he could simply redirect his mail to another free account and nobody would be any the wiser.

There are now plenty of service providers who will register your chosen domain for you, who also offer free web site hosting (this is where they put your web site on the internet for anyone to access), give you half a dozen free mailboxes so that your mail can be sorted and forwarded automatically and most charge less than £100 for the complete service.

There is no need to live with a situation that leaves you at the mercy of a dodgy ISP or with an email address that you could lose if you change your job.

For more information, possibly the best thing to do is to look at www.easily.co.uk or any other domain name registration company. If you would rather deal with a local company, telephone 01273 704427 and speak to Nigel Gill at Escape Velocity.