[mitsubishi]

they are too many nowadays; i don't think there's money in it anymore.

in fact i think it was always a bubble.

ok, you could buy apple.com in 1987 but..

[Quit GT-Rick]

Mitsubishi, on 05 March 2010 - 06:09 PM, said:

ok, you could buy apple.com in 1987 but..

Yeah, domains are worthless now compared to the money you could have got for them during the boom. You definitely can't get the money you could have back in the late 90s. My ex-business partner used to own two quality domains, a .com and a .net. The .com he sold to Microsoft for ~1.5M dollars at the peak (which they're still using for one of their popular networks), and he kept the .net as an investment thinking it would give him at least something close to that. I think at the time we sold the company the domain was worth only $20,000, partially because we had built up the company on it and it had a pretty good google rank. In about 10 years the price dropped from ~$1M to ~$13k just for that domain (which he still owns, believing it will be worth much more again someday :sigh: ).

Sidenote: It's also illegal to domain squat, where you buy a domain for the sole purpose of holding onto it and selling it to someone who holds a trademark or similar. So keep that in mind. The way most people get around that is create a really crappy website to make it look like a legitimate attempt and publish it on the domain while they wait for offers.

One more thing I used to tell everyone that wanted to buy a domain with us... don't. Don't ever buy your domain with the same person you host with. All TOS/AUP will protect the company over the customer. They're written like that on purpose. Some companies will actually hold domains for ransom/hostage and force you to stay with that host for a certain period of time because they write it into their TOS. You also always want to be in a position where you can easily move your site to a new host, in case there is downtime, the host sucks or you just find a better deal somewhere else. Even if the host allows you to move, chances are they won't be happy with it and may even charge you a transfer fee, or drag their feet in the transfer, maybe even keeping your site down for a few days. Try to keep everything separate, you're much more protected in the end. If a host is giving you a free domain, just buy something you think would be cool then spend the $10 and buy the real domain somewhere else. $10 is nothing for peace of mind.

[uJ|V00d00]

I use ukreg.com for all of my domains.

They dont care about transfers etc, you just fill out a form and its gone. :)