Finding And Buying A Domain Name | Hacker News Reader

Finding And Buying A Domain Name

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55 pointsvdondeti30 comments

I think the rent-to-own idea is pretty clever but how would you structure the control of the domain--DNS, etc. I would be reluctant to build a business around a domain which an unscrupulous domain "land-lord" could then redirect to a different site at his whim. I understand that there would be a contract to prevent this sort of thing but while the issue is in courts, your business just died.

>> I would be reluctant to build a business around a domain which an unscrupulous domain "land-lord" could then redirect to a different site at his whim.

That was my first thought when reading that option. You'd definitely need some legal coverage if you decide to enter into that kind of agreement.

If the demand was high enough, someone could make a company that held domains in escrow during these sorts of arrangements.

Is already there, see: https://www.escrow.com/solutions/domain_name/domain_name_hol...

Unless I missed something, it doesn't appear that the buyer can "use" the domain while in Escrow.

My apologies -- you seem to be correct.

On the subject of using words with no meaning, Aaron Patzer had a different philosophy:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1219141

When I saw him speak at WebbyConnect a few years back, he said that he felt the competition's use of hard-to-spell and hard-to-remember names like Wesabe and Geezeo really hurt them (and helped Mint). While it doesn't seem to have hurt Zynga, there is a difference in that the name of Zynga's products are quite easy to spell and remember.

There seems to be a major divide between two-syllable non-meaningful words and three+ syllable ones. Etsy, Zynga, and Google don't sound that hard to remember compared to Wesabe or Geezeo. I suggest a simple test for domain name desirability: the value of a domain name is inversely related to its score in Scrabble.

How do people feel about longer combinations of meaningful words, like BingoCardCreator, SecondMarket, or AppointmentReminder? I see a tradeoff between the number of total words and the complexity of each individual word, e.g. CreditKarma vs. HotOrNot.

Then Zynga(18) is worth less than Geezeo(16), which ain't the case!

I tend to agree with 37Signals on this -- they basically say that the name of your product matters a lot more than that product's domain name, so long as you get a domain that's "close enough." If you think about it, that makes a lot of sense, because most people find sites on the web either by following links or by searching Google/Bing/etc., neither of which rely on knowing what the destination URL is.

His advice of buying the actual product name (e.g. foursquare.com instead of playfoursquare.com) post-launch is good advice though, because it can help push your product beyond the early adopter stage.

By way of example...

A couple of years ago, my buddy and I made a parody site "Woofer" -- like Twitter, but with a 1400 character minimum per 'woof'.

We tried to buy the domain name woofer.com. We tried rent to own. The owner wouldn't budge.

We ended up purchasing "Woofertime.com". Within 1 month we were the top organic search result for "woofer", even above Woofer.com and Wikipedia.

(It's since fallen to #4, and in truth I'm not even sure if the site works anymore. It was just a joke. But, the fact remains that during its peak, we didn't need the .com)

I think this was written up here on Hacker News a few weeks ago but it is relevant for this discussion and thought I'd link to it if anyone is interested. It is 24,000 five-letter domain names that are available: http://www.kevinohashi.com/17/04/2011/other-24000-available-...

(I'm not the author but I bookmarked the site for some new projects. I didn't find anything that jumped out at me on a first pass but maybe something will for you!)

I'd just like to add I made a similar blogpost, 20337 available alliterative .com domain names http://rawsyntax.com/post/4839370351/20337-available-alliter...

I am the author and thanks :) A lot jumped out at me but less than 10 that I pulled the trigger on. I really couldn't find a way to organize/sort them in a meaningful ranking. You're motivating me to release bigger lists with 6-7 letters though.

Domains do NOT have to cost you ANY $$$ I have started OpenDomain - an Open source project that lets open source groups use for FREE: Please contact me @JSON if you would like to use NoSql.Com 4NY.Com 4DC.Com wUSB.Com JSON.Com LocalFeed.Com Free.TV

Some references: Dries Buytaert Founder of Drupal CMS http://buytaert.net/drupal-com

Brendan Eich Creator of JavaScript, CEO of Mozilla OpenDomain: http://www.ecmascript.org/

Jon Ferraiolo, IBM W3C - the leader of the OpenAjax Alliance http://www.openajax.org/OpenDomain.php

Peter S. Andre Jabber protocol http://xmpp.org/xsf/press/2005-12-30.shtml

Tim O'Reilly http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_inner_circles_of_10... OpenDomain: http://Oscon.com

Others http://nunit.com/blogs/?p=36 http://www.greylisting.org/about.shtml http://archive.fosdem.org/2008/sponsors

It's interesting that Wilson says "Etsy" doesn't mean anything. I assumed it was a phoneticization of "etc.".

hmm. i never thought of that. i'll have to ask rob kalin if that was the inspiration. i don't think so.

I always assumed it was 'etc' as well. Maybe only *nix people assume that because thinking about it, the only time I've ever heard 'etc' pronounced 'etsy' is with reference to the /etc directory.

According to this CNN article: "in a January 2010 interview for Reader's Digest, founder Rob Kalin finally revealed the secret: "I wanted a nonsense word because I wanted to build the brand from scratch. I was watching Fellini's 8 ½ and writing down what I was hearing. In Italian, you say 'etsi' a lot. It means 'oh, yes.' And in Latin, it means 'and if.'"

http://articles.cnn.com/2011-04-22/living/website.name.origi...

It's also a Greek word, meaning (roughly) "like this".

yes. that's what rob told me too.

I thought it was a derivative of "Betsy," connoting a friendly 60something lady knitting scarves.

Would anybody be interested in this?

I have relaun.ch. It's free for a month. If you get over 100,000 uniques it's yours forever. Otherwise I give it to the next company with a good idea, with similar conditions.

I don't care about the money, just if you have a good idea.

personally I find that domains are severely undervalued for what they are.

I mean think about it...once you own a domain, you have a monopoly on it. You can charge whatever you want...and if someone wants it, they have no choice but to go through you.

If somebody wants it... There are ~91 million registered .com domain names, and >220 million domain names of length 6 or less. The mode, the most frequent domain name length, is 12.

There are quite a lot of free domain names.

(source: the zone file we got from verisign that we use for nametoolkit.com)

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