… or how I learned to stop worrying and love buying a domain. Wait …
I have been working late the last couple weeks, and so this week a follow up on something I had have been working on for a few months. Back when I started using fallingstuff as my nom de plume I went to update my website with a new fallingstuff domain. I quickly found out that the .com was already in use as a redirect to a blogger blog for a programmer who wrote a screen saver by the name of “falling stuff”.
I was a little put out at the time but kept on going with the .net domain and kept on going. Fast forward to earlier this year and I found that the domain was available and up for auction, for more money than I was willing to spend at the time, so I waited. I waited until the auction was just about up (around 2 months) and then put an offer down … which was countered almost a week later for the full amount of the domain. After some debate I decided it was not worth trying to fight some parking company that appeared to not be concerned with negotiating and, well, I really wanted the .com … So I bought it.
Out of paranoia I kept it all under my hat until I could get the name transferred to hosting I felt more comfortable with. It turns out that ICANN (the global domain registrar) has rules about how often you can change the companies that host domain names. I am jumping the gun a bit but I will finally be able to move the name from godaddy to the registrar that backs my webhost within about a week and I am very excited.
Now … If I ever think about doing this again … well I am going to think twice. Dealing with domain name auctions and transferring registrars is a pain .. and I only do this for fun.