Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How and why we acquired our .com domain

advaitruia.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 146 posts

Re: How and why we acquired our .com domain

#91

Post by acherion »

vxNsr wrote: post #59
ceejayoz wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC (it was long ago): Expired card, broke college student, procrastination, and at a time where domain squatting was somewhat new.

Yea expired card is what scares me the most, I think these days theoretically that shouldn’t be a problem because cc companies will proactively send out the new info to companies charging recurring payments (which can be good and bad).

A registrar I use for my local domains (I'm in Australia, and use a local registrar for .au domains) has my CC details on file including the expiry date. They send me an email out a couple of months before the expiry date reminding me to update my CC details, which is nice.

Re: How and why we acquired our .com domain

#92

Post by acherion »

rolenthedeep wrote: post #81

I am the proud owner of my own firstnamelastname.com 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…

Many years ago I got mylastname.com for a normal price (like $20 a year or whatever) and then forgot about it. It helps that I have a very unique surname.

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!

Re: How and why we acquired our .com domain

#93

Post by bruce511 »

asimpletune wrote: post #21

I feel like the take away from this is 1.) start with a .com domain and 2.) choose a company name that is cheap to buy for a domain.

Yeah, this. Some years ago we started a new product. We just kept plugging names into a name registrar until one we liked was com-available. We paid the princely sum of $15 or something.

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.

Re: How and why we acquired our .com domain

#94

Post by rolenthedeep »

Waterluvian wrote: post #84
rolenthedeep wrote: post #81

I am the proud owner of my own firstnamelastname.com 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…

$5000 can do a lot of good in the world. But it’s your property to do what you will with, for sure.

If someone offered you $5000 to change the email address you've used on every website for a decade, would you? All of your banking and financial accounts, your phone and utility bills, your doctor. Could you even identify every place you've ever used it?

That sounds like an awful lot more than $5k worth of work to me

Re: How and why we acquired our .com domain

#95

Post by arbitrandomuser »

acherion wrote: post #92
rolenthedeep wrote: post #81

I am the proud owner of my own firstnamelastname.com 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…

Many years ago I got mylastname.com for a normal price (like $20 a year or whatever) and then forgot about it. It helps that I have a very unique surname. 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 s…

Why are online domain name searche sites untrustworthy ?

Re: How and why we acquired our .com domain

#96

Post by advaitruia »

CharlesW wrote: post #76
horsawlarway wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this section is fairly compelling: "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…

That's interesting, and I wish the author would've dug into that more. The claim is that people were typing .com when searching for them, but a search would've resulted in a search page, not direct traffic. 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…

The claim is that we saw traffic patterns on the .com mirror that of the .io even though nothing was on it yet and we had not migrated.

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.

Re: How and why we acquired our .com domain

#97

Post by nerdbert »

arbitrandomuser wrote: post #95
acherion wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many years ago I got mylastname.com for a normal price (like $20 a year or whatever) and then forgot about it. It helps that I have a very unique surname. 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 s…

Why are online domain name searche sites untrustworthy ?

Some registrars have done something called "domain tasting", where they will register a domain when they see interest via their web whois tool. Then they will offer it for a higher price. They were able to register it for five days without paying anything, and then cancel the registration if they didn't manage to sell it.

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.

Re: How and why we acquired our .com domain

#98

Post by nerdbert »

rolenthedeep wrote: post #94
Waterluvian wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$5000 can do a lot of good in the world. But it’s your property to do what you will with, for sure.

If someone offered you $5000 to change the email address you've used on every website for a decade, would you? All of your banking and financial accounts, your phone and utility bills, your doctor. Could you even identify every place you've ever used it? That sounds like an awful lot more than $5k worth of work to me

Think of how many people still use their ISP's domain for their email address...

Re: How and why we acquired our .com domain

#99

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

mappu wrote: post #90
q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admire your decisiveness on the email branding. I own a few domains I could use for such a thing, but I'm still trying to figure out the best local-part. 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.co…

I own firstn@melastna.me, that's optimal if your surname matches a ccTLD.

Mine does, but I don’t think you can just buy domains from Eritrea right now unfortunately.
Post reply on HN