As the owner of unitarianuniversalist.org, I’ve previously expressed my confusion of why the UUA administration doesn’t buy other domains that it can use to tease apart its huge body of resources. So far there’s uuworld.org and there was the paranoic buy-up of domains during the American Unitarian Association/Conference bruhaha. (Which have all since lapsed.) At the very least, it needs a memorable (to non-Unitarian Universalists) site for basic information, and perhaps another for lay leadership info.
Oh, and the serve problems are really getting bad. UUA.org is down a lot of the time, and with all its eggs in one basket (several districts, too) easy access to information is not a given.
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I do think the UUA could benefit from breaking the site up. Right now the navigation is very user unfriendly and I think breaking out into distinct sites could ease that problem. MSN has lots of resources, but I think navigation through msn, hotmail, etc. is pretty easy. However, I don’t think grabbing a bunch of top level domain names is necessary. I would rather see them take the approach that Google has, and try and use the domain name service as intended. For example Google uses maps.google.com, news.google.com, mail.google.com, etc. Of course they do have gmail.com, but that is makes sense since they call their e-mail product gmail. So, similar to uuworld that purchase makes sense. Breaking out into ga.uua.org (all things GA), news.uua.org (all your latest UUA updates), worshipweb.uua.org (worship resources for congregations), etc. would work just fine and keep the recognition of “uua.org”.
Server availability should not drive the decisions. If there is a benefit to keeping everything under a single name then there are ways to scale to handle the load and keep availability. Any decision they make should simply be based on what’s logical and easy to remember for the end users. The server availability and uptime should, of course, be addressed.