How and why we acquired our .com domain
advaitruia.com
advaitruia.com
My dream .com domain name is squatted by somebody in Korea owning 10.000s of domains. One year they forgot to pay their registration, 'whois' printed 'overdue' (can't remember the exact words). I tried to register, backorder, everything. Nothing worked sadly.
In my case, I failed to notice the renewal notice and only realized that I missed it once the domains stopped resolving. The grace period let me avoid losing them.
I've been working on going from calendar reminders to, at least, semi-automating checking a list of expiration dates, and then checking regularly. I'm still making mistakes, I'm just trying to avoid repeating them and instead make exciting new mistakes.
For about 3 months, I checked the whois weekly. Some company was holding it. I never visited the domain in any way, to help the domain feel dead to their analytics.
Then one day, the whois result matched what you get from whois-ing a bunch of random letters with .com. It was finally released. I registered it from a company like namesilo or porkbun for the standard .com price.
I created an app with that name, unfortunately the domain was already in possession of a turkish PV company that went out of business. I noticed that the domain will lapse in a couple of months, so I used Snapnames (if I remember correctly) to set up a domain drop catching service.
Meanwhile, I got an email from someone representing the Turkish company who independently asked me if I wanted to buy the domain for a couple of thousand USD. I was getting nervous, but decided to go radiosilent on that matter.
Well it worked, they must have thought I'm out of business as well, or whatever. A couple weeks later the domain dropped and got picked up by Snapnames in my name.
You might want to put the actual supertokens.com domain name in the title to avoid this confusion. HN is certainly not the only site that highlights the domain name of submitted URLs.
If I'd urgently needed it back, I'd have had to spend more, yes.
If they really matter, extend registration for 10 years and keep adding one annually.
The bigger issue is that if your registrar sends a lot of spammy emails (ahem godaddy) you might miss the message reminding you to replace your expired cards.
Or maybe decreasing by very small amounts to show them the direction the negotiations are going to go if they keep it up.
I am not even sure how would I go about placing a bid.
It is an uncommon name not in English dictionary. Possibly my namesake bought it 20 years ago and has done absolutely nothing (not even placed parking on it).
How could I even contact them?
Also, I'd hate to pay a broker $100 just to be told that they can't do anything.
Now commission based I could see myself doing that.
Then again I am not willing to go 5 figures for a vanity domain - more like mid 4 figures just like the guys in the article.
When I first ventured into web hosting, the domain was dead, but still registered. I did a whois and got Firstname Lastname. Not sure what I expected, really.
After some years I randomly checked with my favorite registrar, and it was suddenly available for $15/yr. Immediately grabbed that, no regrets.
A couple of years ago, I got a series of emails from some broker offering me an increasing amount of money for the domain. I think they gave up at $5k, and I never responded. $5k would have been incredible at the time, but by then I was fully committed to my FirstName@firstnamelastname.com email address.
I guess I never really put a website at that domain, it's just an email address. I keep telling myself I'll do it eventually, but it's been almost 10 years at this point...
That sounds like an awful lot more than $5k worth of work to me
Finally got around to putting together my personal site this past weekend. Just a simple blog and centralized place to post updates and photos for family. I was dragging my feet for a while but finally made a big push.
Nostalgia for the simplicity of the GeoCity days made me apprehensive over the years.
Consider the possibilities! Sure, you could go classic and timeless, like yours, with FirstName@. But what about cool and terse, like initial@firstnamelastname.com? Or something unique and artisanal (that will hopefully never get old), like io@firstnamelastname.com?
(I've even seen a few people do hello@firstnamelastname.com, though I could never bring myself to do such a thing.)
first@firstlast.example seem rather redundant; like saying "John John Doe". I guess if it was a business it would make more sense; like "John, owner of John Doe Inc." and "Bob, assistant for John Doe Inc." but for a personal domain... eh.
Similarly mail@ email@ seem 'too obvious' since.. of course it's email? Directional local parts like talkto@ to@ only make sense for inbound-only or outbound-only.
I do like io@! hello@, contact@, note@, or communique@ also seem more neutral but at this point I'm getting dizzy lol.
first@last.example seems more simple in retrospect but also harder to get.
I wish I could get just lastna.me or lastname.com but I share the name with someone who's worked at icann, google and the white house at various points. I never had a shot.
A few years afterwards, I woke up one morning with the bright idea that I should probably secure mylastname.com in case some jerk off domain name squatter grabs it. I do a whois from the command line (I don't trust the online domain name search sites anymore) and saw that it was already taken! What the hell! My last name is so unique, how did anyone know, let alone a domain name squatter, to snap this domain name from under my nose!
I go to try and find more info about the domain outside of what was in the whois info (eg. who should I contact to try and negotiate a price for mylastname.com) but the domain didn't go anywhere when typed into my browser. Bummed out, I go into my usual domain name registrar dashboard to try and perhaps get the .net version or something, and there I saw in my list of currently owned domain names, the very mylastname.com domain I was looking at buying.
The squatter was me all along! </callWasComingFromInsideTheHouse>
This has mostly stopped since about 2010 when registrars had to start paying a few cents per transaction. Since the overwhelming majority of those never converted to a sale, it's no longer really economically viable and I don't think it's much of a worry today.
One day later I decided I was ready and went to buy one, but everything I had searched was suddenly only available to buy jacked up with a huge "premium" fee and seemed to be owned by GoDaddy. Never again will I search using their console.
No regrets! ...and the rest of my family loves having first@last email addresses :).
I wouldn't defensively buy from a broker or squatter, but for unregistered domains, I think it's a no-brainer to do it.
Other than that, additional domains also give leverage for diversification if you decide to make them publicly visitable one day.
Genuine question: Is there any tangible/technical benefit to this, or is it just for the sake of keeping them organised?
I can’t really think of anything else that would really benefit from having its own domain though, especially if your DNS infrastructure supports nested zones.
The reason is pragmatic: if a company provides such kind of services then it may fall under a (false) scrutiny one day after somebody uses one of its services for, say, planting a stealth DDoS attack. The whole domain may be yanked or denylisted, and the last domain you want to see under the fire is your .com domain.
The same goes to .org: you do not want to see outsiders messing with your organizational endpoints and internal operations, so you better move them to a separate domain for the sake of a) clarity and b) risk hedging.
There are two drawbacks though: 1) higher domain costs 2) if you are not careful enough in managing expectations, people may be confused about which one to use and when.
My main concern was that someone with more money than me could come along, start using it, trademark it, and make it unusable for me. I've been thinking about trying to trademark it, but it's expensive and complicated, especially if I can't get a trademark personally and transfer it to a business in the future
In the meantime I decided it was worth the money to buy every decent TLD as a way of discouraging someone else from trying to use the same name. It's not cheap, but it's cheap in the context of what people like the OP pay for a decent .com.
I pay about $200 / year in total to renew about a dozen matching domains. I can hold onto those for 20 years and it'll still cost less than the asking price of a half decent .com.
Think of the .net and .org as a $3 month expense for brand protection. I'm from Canada where .com and .ca are used pretty equally. I remember about 10 years ago when a local computer store only registered one of them and ended up with an unhappy customer redirecting the other to a porn site. Would you pay $3 / month to avoid dealing with that?
Trademarks are a bit of a pain, but you totally can get the trademark registered to you personally and transfer it to a different entity later.
The main things people miss about trademarks is that they're category-specific (If I have trademark "Foo" for a food product, that doesn't prevent someone else from getting trademark "Foo" for sporting goods), and that you have to actively be doing business (in that category) using the trademark first. You can't register the trademark until after you've been engaging in commerce with it.
Is that US? I'm in Canada. I think we can register before commercial use [1]:
> Another of your responsibilities as the owner of a trademark is to use the trademark in Canada. If you do not use it, the registration could be expunged from the Register of Trademarks by the Registrar. The Registrar could start summary expungement proceedings, after three years beginning on the day on which a trademark is registered
To me, that sounds like you have to use it within 3 years of registering and I didn't see anything requiring commercial use prior to registration in the linked info.
We also have a ~3 year backlog for applications and I don't know if the trademark ends up registered with the filing date or the issuance date. It's the kind of thing that's complicated enough that I wouldn't want to risk screwing it up, so I'm waiting until I can pay someone that knows what they're doing.
TLDR; It's complicated and expensive, especially compared to the simplicity of pulling out a credit card and registering a dozen TLDs. Lol.
1. https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/canadian-intellectual-prope...
This happened recently with substack.net.
What I want to say is that I don't like this practice either but should we cancel businesses just because we don't like them? They are not stealing or anything. I'd say they are in a light grey business but for sure not black.
And I guess there is a bright side to this all too. At least for large-ish businesses. If nissan.com was owned by domain squatter then they would sell it to Nisan for 1M or something and both sides would be happy.
I've been trying to buy a domain for 15 years. I'm the only one interested in it. But still haven't been able to close the deal as it's too expensive.
> After a few hours, the broker sent me this from the seller.. > "Our price is final on this one"
and
> ... we got a great deal on his broker fees and paid $4,000 all said and done
It read as though the seller was firm on $8k, but then sold for $4k?
However I am aware of how squatters behave, so this could actually happen.
The broker was $1-1.5K
>That’s exactly what we did. We had a brief discussion on broker fees, our domain broker had already proved himself and we liked him. The feeling was mutual, we got a great deal on his broker fees and paid $8,000 all said and done.
If you paid 8,000 for the domain and 1,000 or 1,500 for the broker, you paid 9,000 or 9,500, all said and done.
I only now understand that it was $8000 + $1000 broker fee based on your replies here.
It's not impossible to win the lottery without buying ticket. Someone can give you one. You could find one on the street. etc.
There's also saying "buying a lottery ticket only very slightly increases your odds of winning it".
The only likely exceptions I'm aware of that don't require either cheating or inside information are atypically large progressive jackpots without commensurate increases in ticket sales (unlikely exceptions include finding exploitable patterns in inadequately randomized draws before they're otherwise brought to the attention of lottery operators).
For the record, my own personal net lottery winnings total nearly $400, consisting almost entirely of gifts and winning scratch-offs I've picked up off the ground (slightly more than $400 in winnings less $5–10 I've spent buying three or four tickets in my life).
My total winnings in a lifetime is $2.
There was some group that determined that it was possible to get a return of slightly over 1.0 on lottery tickets (I forget all the parameters, although the one I remember was playing numbers only greater than 31 to reduce the odds of sharing the jackpot with people who play birthdays/anniversaries/etc) and the return time to get slightly over 1.0 was several thousand years (this is all based on memories that are 30ish years old, so I may have some details wrong).
So i guess if nothing else we saved a few bucks there :)
Names are like ideas, there are plenty of them and you can basically just keep discarding the bad ones until a hood one comes along.
Isn't it expected that when you make it to the top (being for example a top 20 YC company by valuation) you go out and buy the .com? What would be interesting to know is, how many of the top 20 or top 50 started with .com.
Ten years ago, there was still some merit to this. Given changes to browsers and search engines, I believe this has a "vanity license plate" level of importance today.
> There is no definite way of isolating the importance of the .com but it is likely to have played a part.
"We have no way of knowing if traffic would be as high or higher if we stuck with .io, but it definitely would not have been."
"One of the first things we noticed was that the traffic patterns between supertokens.io (our actual domain) and supertokens.com were nearly identical. Whenever our .io traffic had a big spike, so did the .com, even though there was nothing on it yet. More importantly, these spikes meant that a significant portion of potential users went to supertokens.com directly."
If they're driving traffic spikes to a domain squatter - probably reasonable to assume owning both those domains is helping.
Plus - 8k is a pittance, all things considered.
As far as direct traffic, they migrated to .com on 1/15/23, at which point supertokens.com already had 1,473 referring domains and 16.6K backlinks. I think it's more likely that the traffic they saw was the result of that instead of people typing the exact domain name (which is relatively rare).
I'd also submit that this is the story as told by their agency, who probably also told them to write this content marketing piece based on that explanation.
Our inference or best guess based on the above is that people were typing supertokens.com directly in the URL bar on the browser. Like you said - I would not have expected that (and still doubt it) but dont have any alternative explanations for why that would be the case.
Our agency doesnt know we've even written this. I still need to share it with them.
Don’t look to large, well-known registrars. I would suggest that you look for local registrars in your area. The TLD registry for your country/area usually has a list of the authorized registrars, so you can simply search that for entities with a local address.
Disclaimer: I work at such a small registrar, but you are not in our target market.
> Pick them carefully, don’t skimp, and make sure they have good support. Because when things go pear-shaped, you really want to be able to actually talk to someone to change your web server or e-mail DNS records (or even DNS servers) to somewhere else.
> Big registrars can’t afford any support costs since they prefer to squeeze the price down as far as possible, and therefore they prefer to simply lose or outright drop any customer in case of any and all problems. Conversely, small registrars may charge more, but have better (i.e. actually existing, and sometimes even dedicated and personal) support for when things go wrong, and have a vested interest in keeping you as a customer.
> A small registrar might also be so small as to know you personally, which will help monumentally against any social engineering attacks.
How is it possible to conclude that "it is likely" given there aren't any evidence to support that?
After reading the article my takeaways are that a) the agency you hired might have helped you with SEO much more than changing the domain and b) the success you had after the migration don't correlate with the domain change, but more with your distribution.
To be honest, I'm not really convinced that purchasing the .com has played a role in your success after reading this.
Is there a best practice what to do in this situation today? I'm currently forwarding from .com to the .net domain. Should I forward from .net to the new .com domain instead? Or keep it as it is?
Depending on the answers to these questions, I would evaluate the tradeoffs of migrating. If SEO is not critical or if you already have a certain domain authority / backlinks or dont plan to continue for a long period of time - then it may not make sense to migrate.
For the last several years, bitcoin and crypto related domain names have been really hot and selling at high prices. supertokens.com would make a great crypto business name, this would have been in the seller's mind when he set the price. I'm surprised that your domain broker didn't mention it.
If you lose the dispute, you'll never buy the domain for a reasonable price after that, so it's a really risky move.
Do you have any plans to support Ping Federate? Since they took over Auth0 from Okta, they have raised prices like hell and a project like this really makes sense.
So if PingFederate is the provider, you can add "sign in with Ping" on an app that uses SuperTokens
I've got many domains I paid $5k+ for sitting in my portfolio unused because I wasn't going to settle on mediocre domain to save a few bucks for a business I expect to make that amount in MRR within a year.