How Not to Buy a Domain Name
Months back, my wife and I decided to move our food blog from jane.cucumbertown.com to a proper custom .com domain. As easy as it is to find a good domain name these days, we went through nights of permutation combination, crazy mashups and epiphanies, before we finally agreed on alittlebitofspice.com. I was actually surprised to stumble upon this beauty at $10/year.
Like the fiftieth guy at the black Friday door buster, I got the domain name in a second at NameCheap.
We then spent a pretty dime to fancy it up. Logo, Facebook page and what not.
The pretty good domain name gave us the boost to write more content. You know, the new home feeling.. Two months later, a friend sends me this on Facebook:
Wow, porn? You’ve got to be kidding me? Na, it should be some ad messing up as malware.
So I directed it to my co-founder Arun.
Twenty minutes later and he comes back with this:
“Did you check what the domain was in the past avatar?” .
Nope, nope and nope.
Between the excitement of finding a domain without any web 2.0 jargons and the frustration from a month long husband-wife fight over silly stupid ideas I, Cherian Thomas, a decade-long consumer web activist who holds his head high as the industry advocate, advisor to teenagers on Internet career choices, Internet Messenger helper of the elderly and the friendly neighborhood laptop re-starter never anticipated this blunder. Talk about taking a massive ego hit!
So friends, the next time you decide to buy Internet real estate, two words: due diligence.
