

Ask HN: Do you buy related domains early on (.net, .org, similar spellings)? - boggles

When you buy a domain do you buy a lot of related domains (.net, .org and other similar sounding names).<p>I assume there's a chance that a competitor could buy these and take some traffic from mispellings, etc.<p>But if you don't know how successful your app is going to be, this can be a lot of upfront expense.
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jacquesm
Yes, absolutely. It's a lot cheaper than buying them from some guy riding on
your coattails a couple of years later.

If 16 bucks decides the go/no go on something like that you are probably
looking at a hobby project, not a business.

One way around this problem is to have a bunch of generic domains that you do
your first trials on, if you find that something 'has legs' you can always
decide at that point to come up with a good name and get a complete set of
domains.

It also will help to stop phishers that will use the .net or .org version of
your domain in a spam campaign to tell people that their password may have
been compromised and other jokes like that.

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MicahWedemeyer
I'd actually wait a couple months, and then buy in stages.

If you're still working on it after 6 months, get the .net/.org/etc Consider
it a present to yourself for crossing that milestone.

I personally don't buy misspellings, but I will get ones that have a phonetic
similarity (for instance, we have both doleaf.com and dewleaf.com)

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patio11
When I started out I owned just the .com, for years.

These days I would seriously buy the big three for so much as a good turn of
phrase in a blog post. (If you're going to coin the next "Long Tail", own the
domain and you'll own the idea by default.) Registering the big three for two
years costs far less than writing a blog post does.

I don't typically worry about typos or adjacent domains unless they're
extraordinarily likely to cause confusion (chinesenewyearbingocards.com vs
chinesenewyearsbingocards.com -- I bought that after I was incapable of even
writing my Apache config without mixing the two of them).

The competitor with every plural variation of my domains can enjoy the extra
10 visits a year he gets from them. I have better things to do with my time.

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matt1
Earlier this year I worked on a domain name finding site called Domain Pigeon.
When I was telling people about it over email or AIM, people kept spelling it
"pidgeon" like you would spell "fridge". I bought the domain name
domainpidgeon.com and directed it to the actual site.

Kind of ironic, given the site was for finding good domain names...

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nollidge
Linguists might spell it "pidgin" instead.

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ErrantX
not always. I usualy grab .com, .co.uk and .net. I get .org if I thikn in the
future it might work for a organisation / charity but I dont redirect to the
related site.

I dont buy misspellings usually....

What I do do though is if I think of an idea and find a good domain for it I
grab the domain; I think I have around 50-80 domain names (not unique; that
includes the TLD variants) sat waiting for my projects to go on them.

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dschobel
equally important these days, register the relevant twitter account

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vabmit
You have to be careful to do major registrations quickly. I registered the
twitter account (made a tweet), registered the facebook account (added only
some very basic profile information), and then went to register the Google
account only to find out it was already taken. My company name was (random two
digit number)[no space](uncommon word). I did extensive searches in Google and
other places before I decided to use it.

It was probably the tweet that got me into trouble. I'm kicking myself for not
realizing that would happen before hand.

I should have registered everything (including the domains) as quickly as I
could (in near immediate succession). Only after that should I have started
tweeting or filling out any information beyond what was required to establish
ownership over the accounts.

Now, I'm sure there's someone out there who hopes to either sell me the google
account, or attempt to use the google account for financial fraud.

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petesalty
I used to buy all of them but these days I usually go .com, .net and .org.
I'll also do any spellings that I think are useful. For example, I have a
Twitter app that uses a bot under the username glu. I was originally going to
call the app gluenote but I thought people might have an easier time with the
name if it was directly related to the Twitter name so I got both gluenote and
glunote. It turned out to be a good decision. For the $8 I think it's worth
it.

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liranbaron
It's pretty cheap to buy domain names so if you have the $20-$30 to buy the
domains do it. Why not.

Much better than to have somebody see you, recognize potential and buy your
other domains and then demand some $15M for it. Of course the odds of this
happening are quite low, but nevertheless, in the event that you make it it's
a small price to pay to avoid the future headache.

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covercash
Don't forget the WWWDOMAIN.COM typo... I think TechCrunch recently had a story
about that.

edit: Yah, it was TC that had the story... just visit <http://wwwtwitter.com>
to check it out.

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timcederman
I quite like seeing what showed up on cederman.net (I've had cederman.com for
10 years now)

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cbz
I'd buy all at once, i won't pay extra for something i'm getting at lowest
price.

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axod
I'd always buy .com+.net+.org+.co.uk The rest aren't that big a deal.

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DanHulton
Why .co.uk? Is it actually that popular, or is this UK bias?

Like for myself, would I replace .co.uk with .ca?

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axod
oh sorry, slight bias (I'm in the UK), also I thought that if you search on
google.co.uk it gives some preference to .co.uk domains.

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simonk
Same if you search google.ca it gives better for .ca domains.

