I’ve purchased hundreds of domain names, for myself and for work, and I’ve learned quite a few things from doing so. I just got done organizing my domain names and tidying up the administrative side of them. I let a few of them go and am in the process of consolidating the rest to a single account.
The whole process can be mildly frustrating so I decided to publish a few tips for anyone who is thinking about buying some domain names.
1. Don’t opt for the private whois registry information–even if it’s free.
They say it’s to prevent spam to your inbox, but believe me, you get enough of that anyway. It may be cheap/free at first, but when it comes time to renew, that privacy setting costs just as much as the domain name and you’ll likely forget to uncheck it.
2. Don’t buy anything other than .com, .org, or .net unless you’re a spammer.
The dot com is a no-fail classic. You can’t go wrong with it. Dot org works if you’re a non-profit or open-source project. Dot net really only works for hosting companies, but they should probably use dot com if they can.
On the checkout page, registrars like to throw specials at you where you can get the .biz, .info, and .name equivalents for only a few bucks more. Don’t do it. I’ve fallen for it and found myself with domains that I don’t want or use.
3. Don’t forget to renew.
I actually found out tonight that one of my domain names, BrewList dot com expired 5 days ago. I was afraid I was going to lose it but, fortunately, I was able to renew it right away. Unfortunately, I had to pay $35. That’s a domain that I’ve been sitting on for over a year now with plans to develop soon.
Many times you can automatically renew your domains each year. That’s a good idea if you have a domain you want to hang on to.
4. Consolidate to one registrar
A while ago, Yahoo small business was offering $1.99 domain names for new customers with a limit of one. I thought, “Hey, good deal!” So I created a number of accounts and bought one domain name under each of them. It was a way to score that deal, but it left me with a mess of accounts to manage. The better thing to do is to have one account at a major registrar and keep them there.
At work, I thought I finally had an exhaustive list of all the domain names we owned, but I continue to get emails about expiring domain names that nobody knew we had from registrars I’ve never heard of.
I’ve now learned from those mistakes and am transferring all domains to my main account at GoDaddy, where they will remain with an auto-renew so I don’t accidentally lose them again.
