Domain as “www.domain.xy” I mean. Owned, registred, paid for. What is it and why did you do it? Where it is stationed? Why do you need it?
My story:
Well, at first I did not need a domain (still woudn’t), but almost two years ago I found that domain “mylastname.com” (as in my real last name) is not yet taken, so I just registred it for 2 years for 70$. At first I did not know what to do with it, but then I got cable and use my old PII for web, ftp and mail server. So now I have a nice personal page, home business page and really cool mail address - myfirstname@mylastname.com.
Hoo boy. I have more domains than I can shake a stick at.
The first one I got in 1998. It was my last name. I, too, was happy to discover that no one else had claimed it. It’s kind of an unusual name here in the US but is more commonplace in England.
About a year or two later I got contacted by some guy in England, wanting to buy my domain for use with his real estate company. Why he chose my last name I don’t know—perhaps it was regional or whatever. Anyway, he wasn’t going to pay me much (he was sounding like he just wanted me to give it to him because apparently I wasn’t doing enough with it). Well, no dice. I still occasionally get emails from people trying to contact him. He bought up the .org and .net versions of the domain and I guess they get confused.
I suspect that now that more people are on the Internet, probably quite a few people are pissed that I snatched up that domain. They probably are irritated that some dumb American has it. The nerve! Well, too damned bad. You snooze, you lose.
I also bought some domains that related to several interests of mine. I keep these domains updated sorta regularly and I have a some email accounts connected to them as well. These are some odd-sounding domain names. But what the hell. With registrars like godaddy.com ($9 a year?) it’s not like it costs a lot.
I finally got my own domain at the beginning of this year. I’m building it up as a repository of articles and utilities (mainly XML/XSL stuff at the moment).
Unfortunately most variants on my last name were gone, so I had to go with my initial + lastname as the domain name. It’s stationed in a co-lo rack server at London’s TeleHouse.
The main downside to this is that Classmates.com must have been monitoring domain registrations somehow and correctly guessed that the domain name was based on my name. They guessed, incorrectly, that my initial, H, stood for “Horace” and started aggressively spamming me. A relatively small price to pay.
Why, yes, I have a domain name. It’s available in my personal profile. I named it after a significant element of one of my Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, and I primarily use it to post little things of interest to me, and information on my current role-playing campaigns.
Essentially just a personal website, though. I suppose I don’t really need an entire domain, but I just sort of like having one.
The first is personal - it’s a communication aid. Our families are scattered all over the US. It also is a vehicle for sharing genealogy info and sharing our sailing photos. It’s here
The second is my business site: Photo Rebuilder
The third is just a reserved domain name which is the name of our boat.
My SO and I finally buckled under and registered a domain name.
We have absolutely no website with it. What we really wanted was the ability to keep the same email addresses for a long time, without having to put up with the spam that comes with most free email services.
Cost of a domain name: $35 a year
Not having to change addresses: Priceless.
Right now, I have my Web site, with .org, .biz, .info, .us and .ca TLDs.
.com and .net were available when I first registered the .org, but it didn’t occur to me to register it; it was a non-profit site, and at the time (1996) .com was intended for businesses only, with .net for Internet providers, backbone providers and the like.
I used to have .co.za, .co.uk and .co.nz, but it wasn’t worth the cost of maintaining them. I always thought it would be cool to have a .kp (North Korea), .su (old Soviet Union) , .iq (Iraq), aq (Antarctica) or .va (Vatican) TLD.
I have two. One is a personal site I use to host a journal I seldom write in, various documents, and auction images. It’s a .net, as the names I wanted were taken in .com form. I’ve had that one for a couple years now and keep meaning to add things to it.
The other, which I got in September, is for a jewelry business I want to start. It’s a nice, simple, not-too-fussy-sounding .com that currently consists of only a placeholder page.
Got (mylastname).us - when I started trying to get that name, com, org, and net were taken, so when I saw the us domain, I snapped up my last name.
Kathy and I host genealogy for both of our families, personal pages, pages about our cats, and hosting pictures. I host pictures for nationwide members of the Elks lodge who wish to have their picture associated with their profiles on the Elks national website, but don’t have any web space of their own. And I host a message board aimed at Radio on-air personalities, past and present.
And on rare occasions, I host an SDMB live chat room. My first and most recent one was New Year’s Eve - that was fun.
I’ve bought and sold domains since '97. I sold 3 last week for $8500. I was the first to register them back in 1998, so I paid $35/year each, until NetSol got their well deserved bitch-slapping, and $9/year after that. It works out to 3000% percent profit.
I’ve made over $100k trading domains since 1999, and I’m still sitting on 3/4 of my stock.
I’d sell adulthumor.com for $15,000. Don’t go there! It’s not safe for work popup hell. But it gets around 65 “type-in” hits a day, which puts a little dividend in my pocket while I wait to unload it.
I have a couple domain names registered. maxxxie.net is my personal domain. I use it to house a web page (very exciting, no?). Whenever I’m asked for an email address when registering for some crap or other, I give a maxxxie.net address - eg sdmb@maxxxie.net. It helps me identify where some of the spam comes from.
I also have outlawsvolleyball.com - this is for the Outlaws Volleyball club, a gay volleyball association here in Brisbane.
I don’t get much time to tend to either of these two sites, so they’re horribly out of date.
I host them on the free webspace provided by my ISP. DNS and mail redirection are courtesy of zoneedit.com, a free DNS service.
Yes, for our small farm business. (available in my profile) I’m amazed at the number of people who are genuinely impressed by this. I’m also thankful for my husband’s great timing…About 3 weeks after we registered I got a “d’oh” email from a guy in the midwest whose farm shares our name. He really, really, really wanted the domain name.
Right now it has a really, really old web page (and DON’T e-mail me and tell me it’s out of date, you can update it for me, get me great hits on search engines, or what have you - I ain’t interested) which I will one day update. Please note, most of the links are broken. I know this. Please do not e-mail me and tell me this. When my life stops being one crisis after another maybe I’ll do something about it.
(Three guesses what sorts of e-mails I usually get off this webpage)
Mostly, though, it gives me a permanent e-mail address (actually, several) that never changes. This looked real attractive after having had about eight different ISP’s over the years
I got the “dot.com” in case I ever wanted to use it for commercial purposes
Strictly speaking, I don’t need it. I could live a perfectly enjoyable life without it. But I do enjoy owning it and one day I’ll do more with it.
I have also gotten the “You should give this to me because you aren’t using it” attitude as well. Well, tough bullcookies. The virtual real estate is not for sale, thank you very much.
Yes, for about five years I’ve had firstnamelastname.com (with my real first name and last name).
I’ve done absolutely nothing as far as a website: I use it for e-mail convenience. I can change ISPs and I don’t have to send out one of those annoying “my e-mail has changed” e-mails. My friends also get creative with the e-mails, since anything can go in front of the @. I also use it to track who spams me - if I have to register at a website I use websitename@mydomain for my e-mail. When I get spam, I can see where it came from based on who it’s addressed to.
I did find out that I have the same name as a successful motorcycle racer, though. (Superbikes I think they’re called - really fast on tracks). I’ve had photographers send me pictures of “myself” while racing! :eek:
Yeah, I finally broke down and bought my own “Vanity domain.” It’s www.stephi.org
Right now, it’s just my homepage, but I’ve got high aspirations that one of these I’ll sit down and design something really cool! But I doubt I’ll get around to it.
I’ve had mylastname.org for about five years now. Originally, I was given a sublet of mylastname.com, but it irritated me that I could only use my first name with that account… so I finally bit the bullet and bought up .org
It’s really, really nice. I find I can really cut down on spam- like I see several other dopers have done, I use tricks like using “sdmb@mylastname.org” if I’m asked to register. As a result, even after five years, I still only get maybe 1-2 spam emails to my main address.
It’s also really useful, since in the industry I work in, it’s a good idea to have your own webpage.
The only thing I don’t like about it is that occasionally people forget I use .org, not .com.
Oo! I just registered 3. None of them have pages up yet.
I got myfirstnamelastname.com just because it was available. (Mylastname.com was taken. It’s not an uncommon name.) I also got the name of the business that I’m starting.com, and the most common likely misspelling of my business name. (One word in the name has 2 “acceptable” spellings, so I’ll set the misspelled domain up to automatically direct users to the correct site.)
I was considering another name for my business, but the .com domains were taken, so the decision to go with the other choice was easy. I guess that’s just the reality of business in this day and age.
I own stellaluna.org, which is the place where I put a bit of random crap about me, a couple of hobbies, some really bad web design and a huge number of pictures of my child. If it weren’t for the baby page, I’d let the whole thing go when May comes around, but I kind o flike keeping up with her stuff so the family can see her.
I also own dawnmichelle.org which is a site for/about my sister to let people know what’s going on with her after her auto accident. I try to keep people updated on her condition (She’s paralyzed, not comatose or anything.) and there are some pictures, and her friends write in the guestbook and my mom prints them and takes them all to her.
Yes my last name is farely uniqe. I belive about 200 people in this planet share my last name and about 50 I know (that is all close relatives - my famly got through bootleneck throug spanish influenza 85 years ago, my grandgrandad was only surviror in that specific village) and all can have myfirstname@mylastaname.com if they wanted to. And some do.
I’m a composer and songwriter, and the internet has been invaluable to me as an advertising tool. I registered my domain name, which links from my sig, about two years ago and am happy to say that people from as far away as India have bought my CD through it! I can’t even imagine what it must have been like for struggling artists of any nature to get noticed before the internet.
