Beating domain squatters can be a problem, as i found out around 2 months ago. i decided I wanted my own domain, to use for email and not the @hotmail.com address I had used for years.
I decided mattyonline was a good domain main, as it was my nickname with online at the end of it, so could be used for all things i did online. The problem was the .com of mattyonline.com was taken by someone who was just using it to display a page full of adverts, so I thought oh well and registered the mattyonline.net instead as it was free.
Anyway fast forward to today and an email arrives in my junk mail from [email protected] which said:
Hi,
We thought that you definitely need to know that right now the .com version of your domain is secured by Easy domain Recovery and is available for purchase at our page.
What we do is take different measures to help you promote your brand on the Internet. Little things’ effectiveness can compare to securing .com to a domain with any other extension. Everyone knows .com, a lot of users will intuitively seek you at .com extension so don’t give a chance to anyone else to use that advantage of yours.
There are third parties who may be interested in your domain. Many people out there reserve .coms to existing sites and domains in order to make profit of ’em. We may sell the domain to any of these persons and businesses but this is you who decides whether or not we do so. Please choose one of the following:
Secure your domain right now!
Let it go (unsubscribe).
I thought to myself i bet he has registered the domain and wants £100’s for it, so i checked the website he had linked to and it turns out he wanted $100 for the domain.
I never would have paid $100 for it as i refuse to help people make a living from buying random domains to sell on at insane prices. I then did i whois on namecheap.com to see when he registered the domain, it turned out the domain wasn’t registered to anyone so i instantly clicked buy and now own the domain I origionally wanted for $8.81!!
Looking on Domain History Tools it appears the the domain had previously been registered for the last 10 years, with that in mind I think i was quite lucky to get it for $8.81!
You could say the moral of the story is that it pays to check your junk email every so often!
