Starting Out Right
In the late 80’s and early 90’s, I owned a publishing company dealing with the IBM AS/400 computer. About ten, twelve years ago, I was creating our first web site and realized I could acquire the available domain name “AS400.com”. It turned out I did not need it and quickly and easily sold it to IBM for an extraordinarily good amount of money. But, I was so busy running/selling my business at the time it did not occur to me that I should do more of this name buying and selling. Duh! What an idiot I now see I was. I could have been sitting on millions of dollars of domain names right now.
During the last ten years, I didn’t really give much thought to investing in domain names, and now it seems everyone is in the game. But, still, I want in too.
I have had some success with a few web sites in the past, and in the process picked up a few dozen domain names I’ve been holding on to. But a few weeks ago the bug really bit me when I had a conversation with a very successful young domain investor. I was fascinated by the subject and pounded the the poor fellow with innumerable questions. Now, two weeks later, I about about 100 names richer (poorer?). Hopefully I don’t have more money than smarts. I know a few were dumb, but I’m learning. I’ll be telling you more about what I’ve been buying in future posts.
But there is one thing that I want to mention in this post that I think was a smart decision. Now, remember, I’m a rookie, so maybe it just seemed smart to me–I don’t know. But, the important thing is that I feel more secure having done what I did. Let me tell you about it.
I had my 50 or so names registered at a small affiliate domain registrar I had picked many years ago for its low prices. Since I was about to register some more names, I decided to give some thought to if the current registrar was the right long-term registrar for me. After all, if I had hundreds or thousands of names down the road, would I really want to have to go through the work of transferring them all later if I so desired? Not really. I wanted to pick the registrar I’d be married to now.
I also thought of something else: what if my registrar went out of business and I was forced to leave them? That was a scary thought so I asked my new domain friend about this. He told me that if they were to go under, it could possibly become difficult to renew a domain name when the time came up. The domain names would have to be “unlocked” before I could initiate a transfer and I might have problems with a new registrar denying my request to unlock them, insisting I use the original registrar for this. If it really became a problem, I just might have to say hello to an Intellectual Property attorney.
Regardless, even if the process were to go relatively smoothly, it’s the last thing I’d want to deal with, with hundreds of names or more! So, I decided I would go with a very large registrar and not ever have to worry about this situation. An added benefit is that I would gain a much better Domain Management system than the very slim one I had with the current registrar.
After looking around, I chose GoDaddy.com. No, it wasn’t because of the SuperBowl ad. It’s just that they are VERY BIG and their tools suit me. Are there other better, very large registrars? I don’t know–quite possibly. But, GoDaddy works for me and I sleep much better at night now knowing the domains I add each day can stay with them safe and sound for a long, long time. I don’t have time for problems.
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