I’m trying to get a photography company started up and found that mycompany.NET was available. I took it. It seems that mycompany.COM, which is what I really wanted in the first place (and was, until recently, an actively-used website), is now being offered for sale by a company called BuyDomains.com.
Their website doesn’t list the domain’s sale price, but instead asks that interested parties contact them for a quote. They say that prices run from “$688 to over $10,000,” and note that “the prices of Premium Domains are rising weekly!”
Given that they don’t just list a price, it seems to me that before issuing a quote, the company will determine the maximum price they could realistically charge for the domain. Obviously, I’d like to get it at the lowest price I can.
So what should I do? If BuyDomains.com sees that I already have mycompany.net active, it’ll be pretty obvious why I want the .com domain and I fear the price will increase as a result.
I could take my website offline for a few days (I’m still in such a nascent phase that doing so wouldn’t kill me) and submit the request for a price quote. That way, perhaps, my interest in the .com domain wouldn’t seem quite so vested and their sale price may be lower as a result…
Is it worth it, or am I just fretting about nothing?
You know, I was rather curious about this as well and was thinking of starting a thread. My wife has this little side business and I wanted to help her out by giving her her own Web site - but I have no idea how to go about it. I know some services allow you to make your own as part of their deals, but I don’t have any idea how good they are or how to start, and I had no idea that an actual domain name and site would be that expensive.
I’m hardly the most knowledgeable type on this subject, but as I understand it, the only reason it’s that high is because mycompany.com is already owned by a company that wants to make a profit off it. My guess is BuyDomains.com bought it when the previous owners (who ran a site unrelated to what I’m trying to do) gave it up. I’m pretty sure this is pretty much BuyDomains.com’s business model.
If you were to register a virgin domain name – that is, one that’s never been claimed before – the price is a negligible 10 or 20 bucks.
I know it’s a longshot, but do you happen to have the name of your photography company trademarked? If so, you may be able to force them to turn the domain over to you via cybersquatting laws.
A good thought on pursuing anti-cybersquatting laws, but I don’t think they’ll apply in my case, not least because I don’t yet have my company named trademarked.
The site you linked to provides some tests for determining cybersquatting, among them:
The domain name registrant’s intention was to profit from your domain name in bad faith
Your trademark was in effect and widely known at the time the domain name was registered
I can be pretty sure BuyDomains.com did not intend to profit from me particularly (though obviously their intent is to profit in general) since my business was still mostly an idea in my head at about the time they bought the domain name. And even were I to trademark my business name today, it wouldn’t change the fact that BuyDomains.com has owned the rights to mycompany.com for at least several months.
I doubt that would help much. They can just do a whois lookup to see the registration info for your site.
They’re probably going to want several thousand dollars for the domain. I wouldn’t worry too much about it if you can’t get the other domain cheaply. I don’t think it’ll seriously hurt your business if you’ve got a .net and not a .com - Starting out in a small business there are going to be plenty of other places you can probably spend that money and actually have it be worhtwhile.
Maybe spend the money on having a web-designer set up your site. A good looking professional web site wil have a lot more effect on how much business you get than a .net address.
I’ve had someone offer to sell me a “.com” domain (I had the .net). They wrote me. As far as I could tell, they’d never done anything with the .com domain. It was a dictionary word and I think they bought up a lot of domains with dictionary words, hoping to sell them later on. They wanted $50 for this domain. I also want to add here that my domain is not a “normal” name for a domain—it’s probably one that most of you never use or even recognize. The odds of someone else (other than me) using this word for a domain name are remote, to say the least. (The reason I wanted it was because I’m a crackpot, obviously.)
At first I was going to pay it, and then I started to get pissed off. I didn’t really need the .com domain—I’d established the .net one pretty well. And I didn’t see any reason to pay some psuedo cybersquatter $50. They kept on emailing me, offering to sell the domain to me, and I continued to ignore them.
After about a year or so, they gave up on the domain, and I picked it up for $10. I now have it redirecting to my .net domain.
I agree with Santos—I don’t think it matters at this point if you have a .com domain.
I also have a pretty popular .org domain (the .com and .net ones were snatched up years ago). I just checked—the .com for this domain has one of those placeholder pages and an announcement that it is for sale. The .net domain is offline. Am I going to make an offer for either of these domains? Hell no. My site is doing well on its own and I don’t think that buying a .com domain at this late stage in the game is going to make all that much difference. (Of course, if the .com domain offered to sell for some nominal fee, I might go along with it. But it would have to be pretty cheap.)
Unregistered domains are not that expensive. It only costs $15 or so to register a new one that is not taken. If someone already controls the domain name, then you have to buy it from them at whatever price they charge.
If you want to set up a website, I have had good luck with Startlogic. They are a top rated hosting company and very cheap. Two gigabytes of space and 60 GB transfer a month costs less than $100 dollars per year even if they register your domain name for you. I doubt that you will use that much space and I have maxed out my site at 3% of the transfer limit since I have had it.
Within a few months of me starting a geocities site, a company bought ‘my geocities name’.com. My geocities name is not a real word, and clearly somebody lifted all geocities monikers for domain sales.
IMO, <your company name>.com is not terribly valuable. <Your company name>.net isn’t either - you do want .com, because it sounds more established (yes, I know that sounds ridiculous, but it’s true).
Do what Hollywood does when they add ‘movie’ to the title of the movie and .com - just for grins I just typed ‘aviatormovie.com’ and it redirected me to theaviatormovie.com. They’re Hollywood, for dog’s sake - and they don’t even pay ransom for theaviator.com.
Go with <company-name>photography.com or something similar. It sounds professional and respectable.
Nobody is not going to make it to your site because you add ‘photography.’
Much more important is getting good linkage so that you get higher on google.
I register my domains with GoDaddy.com ($7.95 a pop). It’s cheap and I have a lot of domains and they make it pretty easy to manage them all together. I wouldn’t buy a domain name from anyone trying to sell you one. Especially if you already have the .net, it’s just probably not worth it. What you can do is like a previous poster suggested; get mydomainphotography.com or something similar. If you want, you can set up a redirect on your webhost (yosemite mentioned that also), so mydomain.net automatically redirects to mydomainphotography.com (or however you want to set it up.) Domains are so cheap to register, for my homepage I also own the .net and .org registrations just for the hell of it, and if you enter them it just redirects to the .com. It’s pretty simple to do, and gives you the added benefit of say, someone remembering your business name, but not the whole address, and if they enter .net instead of .com, they’re still going to get your page.
In the end, promotion, marketing, and your advertising budget is going to make a much bigger difference than your actual domain name. As long as you’ve got a top level domain (not www.geocities.com/users/trailerpark/myinstanthomepage.html) you’ll do OK.
Re: hosting – I recently switched to DreamHost for all my sites. Right now they’re having a sale. Their cheap account is 9.95 a month, less if you prepay two years, and you get 120GB/transfer. I have their Code Monster account but all their packages are awesome deals and their service is top notch. I did a lot of shopping around because I needed a host I could upgrade to managed dedicated when I need it, and everywhere I looked these guys were highly recommended. Having just gotten done with a really high volume of ad traffic from another site, I have to say I wasn’t disappointed. The last time that happened, my old host (Lunarpages.com) sent me a nastygram and forced me to pay them a bunch of extra $$ because apparently I slowed the server my site was on to pretty much a crawl. =3
(First off, I, the OP have undergone a name-change operation in the middle of this thread. Was Stark. Now RavingMad. Apologize in advance for any confusion.)
Thanks for the replies, all. I guess I do have a somewhat reflexive gotta-get-a-dot-com attitude but I wholeheartedly agree with Beware of Doug that creating a tortuous name just to append it with .com is silly.
My biggest concern, though, is not necessarily that I have .com, but that someone else doesn’t. That is, it’d suck for another photography company to buy up the .com address and put it to use while I have the .net. I’d hate to confuse a potential customer, or lose business to the competitor. Could you imagine if, say, amazon.com and amazon.net offered the same products/services, but were competitors?
Also, at one point, .net was pretty much the exclusive domain of internet service providers and tech companies; has that prety much gone by the wayside, would you say?
I figure I’ll ask BuyDomains.com for a quote anyway, just to see what they’re offering it for.
Just to provide closure to this thread (as if anybody’s waiting with bated breath), BuyDomain.com’s quote for my preferred dot-com address was $2,288. I wonder how they come up with the price.
Well, it’s far, far more than I’m willing to spend since I already have the dot-net addy, but at least now I know.
Before I registered www.xxxxxxxxxxoftexas.com I checked out www.XXXXXXXXX.com and found that it was for sale through this same outfit. At first they wanted $7,000.00 and 3 weeks later it became $8,000.00, I sent them an e-mail stating that I would not be interested unless and until the price fell below $750.00 and I have not heard from them since. I am watching for them to let go of www.XXXXXXXXX.com and if or when they let it go I will register it however these extortionist punks can fuck off.
