How did you get into domains ?

[Bailey]

I'm going to (slightly) alienate the new - Thats anybody that caught on when they saw the £,$ .returns.

But those that took an early punt. (not just one or two domains but dived in)

Some of us must have risked a lot (or so it would have been seen at the time - around the year 2000 or even well before)

 

[Edwin]

I was looking around in 1996 to register a domain name for a project (I forget what) and there was so little information out there that I scrapped whatever-it-was and decided to build a site about domain names instead. The result: iGoldrush.com. Actually, it started out on my "free" 5MB of hosting space that came with my dialup account for a while but I registered the domain name a few months later and the rest is pretty much history.

This was back in the days of Best Domains and DomainMart, for those with long memories. Oh, and $100/year .coms that had to be transferred by faxing all kinds of documents off including a copy of photo ID. How times have changed!

Sold the site about 12 years ago to a great chap, Paul Goldstone of DomainIt, who has overseen several complete overhauls since then...

 

[ratboy]

I fell into it really. Running a paper directory business at school and noticed many of the advertisers were adding "web addresses" - registered a few, and then got hooked.

In hindsight, wish i'd concentrated on domain names in 1997 then, rather than knocking on doors - hoo humm.

 

[Bailey]

For myself, I was fortunate to get a paid redundacy several times, each time using the money to return to full-time education.

I just recall a great femail teacher who went on and on about how big the internet was going to be . The big surprise this was in 1984 - she just wouldn't stop telling us to take every opportunity to be ahead when it finally came in to being (I was studing a hnc in business studies at the time. She done all our students heads in banging on and on when she was supposed to be teaching us advanced level IT for business. (connecting computers was strickly hard-wired from a Main-Frame back then)

Next redundancy payment came along in due course, and low and behold our found myself back on a Full-time IT course. Well that was it -I found myself imaging the Internet and how I would love to own all the best URL's (almost building lists in my head)

There was no way i could afford the $70 -$100 price tag from Network Solutions who I seem to remember having a monopoly on registrations. But, man did my keyboard get busy the day after the market was challenged in court and prices and registration rights became a free-for-all. Spent every penny that the Credit-cards were brave enough to allow me access to.

Wish my Sue (wife) was still around to see all the payback (The credit cards were all in her name)

 

[Bailey]

Some of the typos In my post above would also help explain - why i also ended up with a large bunch of domains nobody seemed to want -

 

[seanc]

i 1st registered domains for IRC vanity, and to make my eggdrops look 'kewl'

 

[monaghan]

I got into domains for the technical challenge, I'd come across a few domains I'd been interested in for different projects along the way and seen the huge price tag some people were charging (Edwin was the 1st that responded to one of my email enquiries all those years ago!). I took out Nominet membership as I'd had so many issues with various 3rd party registrars the only viable option was to do it myself, wrote myself some code to interface my billing system with the automaton then a little while later stumbled on this DAC thingy and saw a technical challenge so re-wrote my registration code to hang off the back of a DAC query - the rest is history. It shows me as registering here in May 2007 - how time flies.

 

[philiporchard]

Some of the typos In my post above would also help explain - why i also ended up with a large bunch of domains nobody seemed to want -

Femail was my favourite!

Looks like you should have registered it though! Seems the Daily Mail own it!

 

[Bailey]

Femail was my favourite!

Looks like you should have registered it though! Seems the Daily Mail own it!

Cheers for that reminder Phil - i did decide to leave that one in the text after recalling a particular renewal i'd done for about 6 years (and was quite proud of) could never understand when I checked who held the other extensions - There wasn't any. Still took another couple of weeks for the penny-to-drop