I spent $35k on a domain | Hacker News Reader

I spent $35k on a domain

testimonial.to

27 pointsrobtaylor46 comments

Am I getting this right? You spent 35K on a 5-syllable .io domain to capture traffic from a twitter account with 43K followers who misspelled your actual domain in a tweet? That can’t be right.

In the math you laid out, you have to get 6 subs a year for 10 years on your $600/year plan in order to recoup your investment.

Why would this tweet generate leads for 10 years? Why didn’t you figure discounted cash flows into the calculation? Will 36K be worth 36K in today’s money 10 years from now? 10 months from now?

And now, your hosting provider is rate limiting your website and returning 429. All this HN traffic is going down the chute. Perhaps you should have spent some of that cash on a more robust hosting plan?

Yes, this doesn't really add up, it's not like a tweet that's gone viral will keep going around, it's safe to say that nearly all the clicks it generated were in the past.

It did however let them write this blog post and generate even more interest, but unfortunately they've failed to make sure their blog can handle traffic, another missed opportunity I suspect.

You'd be surprised by the half-life of a tweet. I have tweets that are still bouncing around accumulating impressions and engagements half a year after I posted them. There's a self-driving cycle that forms where likes and retweets cause the algorithm to push them out into more people's feeds, which lead to a steady stream of additional likes and retweets, which push them into more people's feeds, and so on.

Another way to look at it is that the fact that the tweet made the typo is an indication that other people are likely to make the typo, and this way they don't lose out on those users. .io is probably more memorable than .to.

(It's all arbitrary, of course; they're both just unrelated ISO codes. But for whatever reason, .io has become the canonical “the .com was taken” refuge.)

This smells like a beer goggles purchase which is being retrospectively justified.

I'm the founder who bought the testimonial.io domain.

You really underestimated the value of a SaaS, with 6 subs contributing $3,600 ARR, a business will have the chance to be sold 10x at $36k. I can easily recoup my investment from an exit offer, and the domain itself has its investment value too.

Look things forward, not backward! A twitter account has 43k followers today maybe will have 430k followers next year.

429 is fine, even Cloudflare has an outage just a few days ago. For me, it's just learn the lesson, fix the bug by simply upgrading the plan, then move forward :)

Wasn’t the first time it was misspelled and wouldn’t be the last

Yes. Before reading the Archive.org version someone linked below, I thought from the title that it was a ridiculous course of action, but testimonial.to is just so likely to misspelt that this is probably a good move. Not sure about the cost, though.

That doesn't take into account the additional traffic generated by the "I spent $35k on a domain" story, so there is that as well, this story is on the front page here and I expect will go out in daily and weekly newsletters, so I think it could pick up a few more customers.

I'd love to see a "I spent $35k on a domain" follow up in a year to see if it was a profitable decision or not.

>I'd love to see a "I spent $35k on a domain" follow up in a year to see if it was a profitable decision or not.

Or how about the "remember that guy who spent $35k on a domain" story 5 years from now

The article doesn't focus solely on the tweet, but is considering this typo from the tweet to be common. About the CloudFlare, not much to say. Poor planning it is...

And apparently did not spend $100 (per month?) to make sure the hosting would survive the slashdot-effect.

> This website has been temporarily rate limited

Irony of losing out on HN traffic this time.

Should have spent $350 on a better host

Hmmm.. Cloudflare’s free tier can’t handle an HN hug? Kinda surprised about that.. not really a great advertisement for their free tier tbh.

Edit I see another comment mentioned Workers. Well that is much less surprising. One shouldn’t expect the Workers free tier to handle an HN hug..

But the site is safe from dosers

Archive.org version: https://web.archive.org/web/20220625155059/https://testimoni...

Seems to be Cloudflare Workers rate-limited

Sounds like they should've spent $35,000 on more servers...

Couldn't afford to upgrade the workers plan after spending 35k on the domain.

> This website has been temporarily rate limited

I guess you spent all the money on the domain and not your CloudFlare account.

It probably would have been better in the long-term to rebrand to a non-dictionary .com

Yestimonial.com is for sale and I bet for less than that .io.

I bought dozens of domain typos for my company. I summarized the results in my blog post https://catonmat.net/domain-typos.

How much did you have to spend for all those typos?

I'm assuming less than $35,000, given you were pleased with the 5k extra visitors across the typo domains.

That’s 5k visitors per month. It cost me just $20k, which is peanuts compared to the value these typos bring.

Did you try contacting the owner of testimonial.com and offering them the 35k??

Now that is a good thought. Probably good to use an intermediary though and start at maybe $20k to leave room to negotiate. You never know...

Oh my oh my... I'd rather bribe a Twitter employee to edit that tweet

A .com is infinitely better than a .io and 6 letter brandable .coms are way cheaper than 35k

Why would testimonial.com be less than 35k?

Is the domain worth 1,000x the cost of a paid CloudFlare account to capture all the traffic you're currently losing

> This website has been temporarily rate limited

Huh? Isn't Cloudflare CDN free forever? Is it because its hosted through a Worker?

Yes, Workers are limited to 100,000 requests on the free plan.

100,000 /day https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricing/

So the $35k question is, realizing that they bought the wrong TLD to begin with, will the company rebrand as .io?

https://web.archive.org/web/20220625131156/https://testimoni...

Makes sense you would want to capture that traffic. But why did d you decide on the .to tld to begin with?

Guessing only the .to was available, for what should have been obvious reasons. He would have been better off starting with some randomword.com and building his brand around that - no fear of mis-spelling and a whole lot cheaper.

I got a three letter dot net domain for less than $5k so I can't see spending this much on a typo.

>This website has been temporarily rate limited

>You cannot access this site because the owner has reached their plan limits. Check back later once traffic has gone down.

should have paid a little bit more for hosting then

Just to be clear "I" is not me in this :) I just thought it was interesting.

(Although I have spent a bit more than that on a totally different domain a few years ago, perhaps I should blog that!)

Missed an opportunity with the tweet that pointed to a different domain. Now missing an opportunity due to the Cloudflare Workers reaching the free tier limit.

It makes seems to me, especially since it seems to be a common typo and the price would continue to rise along with the success of his business.

couldn't handle the traffic of I guess 10 people...

Please check back later Error 1027 This website has been temporarily rate limited

You cannot access this site because the owner has reached their plan limits. Check back later once traffic has gone down.

testimonial.io still redirects me to the domain parking site as of right now.

CF Error => This website has been temporarily rate limited

And now no money left for an adequate hosting provider.

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