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How I finally won my name from domain resellers after nine years of waiting

jerryalex.com

91–100 of 129 posts

Re: How I finally won my name from domain resellers after nine years of waiting

#91
post #20

Some bottom feeder stole my personal domain after I let it lapse and is now literally holding it hostage for $6000 last I checked. http://sergiotapia.me/ I just bought sergio.dev, the squatter can choke on my old domain.

I am also facing similar issue. Forgot to renew my domain and now someone has bought it and asking $1000 for it.

This is exactly why I just renewed my personal domain for 10 years!

Re: How I finally won my name from domain resellers after nine years of waiting

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is surprisingly hard to explain off the cuff. In DNS, zones are separated by dots, and a fully-qualified domain name ends in a dot. The zones exist because there are too many domains for just one server to handle and this way zones can be distributed and managed separately. DNS queries right to left, for “Google.com.” it would look at “.” and query the root servers asking if they know “Google.com.”, they could r…

> The zones exist because there are too many domains for just one server to handle and this way zones can be distributed and managed separately. Though that's not really true in practice. Com hasn't exploded under the amount of traffic it faces, and merging in the other zones would only be about twice the load.

Com only handles the NS records and glue records for its direct descendants though. If there were no zones below com, its nameservers would melt from the update requests alone.

Re: How I finally won my name from domain resellers after nine years of waiting

#94
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you let it lapse, is "stole" a bit strong? I'd think "stole" would be getting your login/email and transferring the domain away while you had it registered?

It's more like you dropped your wallet on the street and the guy walking behind you picked it up and won't give it back unless you pay him.

In some jurisdictions, the guy behind you would actually be entitled to a finder's reward in this case. For example, here in Germany, finder's reward is between 3% or 5% of the item's value: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/bgb/__971.html

Re: How I finally won my name from domain resellers after nine years of waiting

#96
post #24

After reading this I thought what the heck let’s see if I can grab my name. For 15$ I now own my name at a .ca domain. I know I need to find a host I think but literally have no website experience or idea what I need to do next lol.

> have no website experience or idea what I need to do next

Here are some ideas:

- Often the company where you bought the domain will also offer email and website hosting. That would be the simplest way to start using the new domain. Otherwise, find a company that provides those two services together.

- Create a file called index.html with the text "hi!". Depending on the web host, it may be possible to do that with a web interface. Otherwise, learn how to edit files on your site using FTP, file transfer protocol.

- Learn HTML and CSS by playing around with that one file. If you find that you enjoy it, well, you'll never stop learning - and who knows where the road might go!

Re: How I finally won my name from domain resellers after nine years of waiting

#97
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course there is actually a ".name". I co-founded the company that set it up, and the original idea was to share the second level so you'd get full control over firstname.lastname.name with e-mail forwarding from [first name]@[last name].name. This followed an e-mail service (Nameplanet) we set up when two of us were discussing how we were both basically blocking a whole [lastname].[tld] domain for ourselves. Unfor…

I have to say, .name always bugged me because it's dependent on ignoring all of us who share the same first+last names with others. It's like a TLD that purposefully implements [1]. At least the other TLDs are free-form, they don't purport to be some sort of registry of people. [1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

It didn't ignore it - we had lots and lots of long discussions about it, and the precursor - Nameplanet - was founded exactly because the alternative was worse; some of the most popular last names are shared by many million people, and a single person per TLD was able to make use of it. By sharing the second level, magnitudes more people would potentially be able to share it.

My last name is extremely rare, but it's still ~400-500 people that share my last name; enough to exhaust all current tlds.

When we founded Nameplanet, we did an extensive exercise to model it, and we bought ~60,000 domain names to maximize coverage of popular last names, and for very popular last names that obviously gave better coverage than .name, but in terms of first name / last name combinations it was better.

Even for people facing collisions, it still meant much simpler addresses a lot of the time.

Your objection is actually largely the opposite of the bigger problem in adoption: The number of people who want their name as their address is much smaller than we thought.

Re: How I finally won my name from domain resellers after nine years of waiting

#98
post #80
post #77

I don't think name as domain is important anymore since it's pretty much a numbers game - it is unlikely you'll get your name as a .com domain(the only domain that matters if you want more than a toy website) is going to either be squatted on or already occupied. There needs to be some sort of TLD with authentication. Let's call it .name You only get .name if you do a KYC/register with the government.In case of colli…

Of course there is actually a ".name". I co-founded the company that set it up, and the original idea was to share the second level so you'd get full control over firstname.lastname.name with e-mail forwarding from [first name]@[last name].name. This followed an e-mail service (Nameplanet) we set up when two of us were discussing how we were both basically blocking a whole [lastname].[tld] domain for ourselves. Unfor…

For non-US customers, what about using regional TLDs?

Re: How I finally won my name from domain resellers after nine years of waiting

#99
Good for you! I enjoyed reading about your persistence and eventual triumph, knowing how shady the business of domain squatting is.

> Generally, these auctions will drive up the price by bidding on their own domains to get you to pay more.

This practice feels like a form of fraud, but I guess it's not against any law..?

> I had also initially setup the script to auto-purchase the domain, but that failed due to Namecheap not recognizing the domain availability in time.

Interesting to hear this, as I was curious about using their API to automate domain purchasing as part of a larger web service. I imagine they cache results and refresh periodically, which is good enough for most purposes.

Re: How I finally won my name from domain resellers after nine years of waiting

#100
I have way too many domain names, but I like it. I have several .uk, .no and .com for my own name, e.g. firstname.tld or firstnamelastname.tld. All redirecting to my main site.

For the first decade or two that was fine as usually the first page or two on a Google search of my name was all me. Very vain. Though I think there are many that shares my Norwegian name, most were not early internet adopters.

However in the last few years, some of the people that also share my name have started to creep up the search result, i.e. they have been covered in news articles or websites of their own. I have now started to feel guilty for hogging all the good domain names. If one of them reach out I would probably hand one of the domain names over at cost or share it somehow.

Though recently I have "reclaimed" some of the first page on Google as the search now states the infamous "Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe" at the bottom. Someone did not want to be infamous. Wasn't me, honest.

I also feel slightly guilty for the few Irish people that have my username as their firstname. Sorry, but I am keeping those domain names.

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