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I am a PhD mathematics student in the United States, and I plan to apply for jobs at liberal arts institutions over the upcoming months.

I currently have a personal website on Weebly.com, which is a service that offers free web-hosting. The URL they've assigned me is myname.weebly.com.

Would potential employers consider this URL unprofessional? It would be printed on my CV and business cards, possibly other places as well. I can pay Weebly $8/month to have a custom URL, but I'd rather not do that if no one would care. If it makes any difference, I know that myname.com is currently available through Weebly.

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I don't think there is any real downside to the weebly.com domain name.

There isn't really an expectation that you have a personal website in the first place in academia. It is "something extra", and the fact that you have it hosted on a free service doesn't seem like a downside to me.

Note, however, that if you do want to register a personal domain, you can do it for about $10 or so a year, much less than Weebly charges. You can't map a Weebly site to a domain without a paid plan, but you could still have the domain redirect there. Also, there are other free hosting services (e.g. Google Sites) that allow mapping the domain without extra charges beyond the domain registration.

Also note the suggestion of Nate Eldredge and others that you could use your university web page as an alternative that is free and looks more "professional". Also, it may help your work be more discoverable. It does have the downside of not coming with you when you change institutions, though.

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  • I really your idea about redirection, thank you.
    – AegisCruiser
    Aug 12, 2016 at 13:50
  • If you use redirecting, be sure you know the difference in the types. One form is simple redirection which tells the browser to navigate over to the other URI. The other actually fields the request by forwarding over to the proper server. (Some tweak the request and others don't, so I'm not going into all the permutations. Sounded like a static site for which the distinctions matter little & that's a question for webdev, so I'll leave it at that.)
    – The Nate
    Aug 12, 2016 at 16:02
  • I disagree. I expect that mathematicians, including graduating PhD students wil have a personal website (meaning a professional site whether their papers, CV, etc can be found).
    – Tom Church
    Aug 12, 2016 at 16:42

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