just curious what a reasonable figure is for a domain like matthewsmith.com or davidrandall.com, guess it probably depends if your name is common or not?
Assuming your first+last is already being parked by someone? Was able to get mine at a registrar, but it was my nickname where I paid a "premium" about 7 years ago... five letters and I really wanted it. Negotiated a guy from $3000 to $300. More specifically, his first response was $3000 then I waited three months and offered $300. He had a formal landing page.. no different from hugedomains.com - I've noticed for non-brandable "premium" domains these services are trying to get $1-2k for personal domains.
About $50/year on initial registration, but that's because .coms were so expensive then / seemed expensive / didn't find cheaper options.
Then $10 / year. And now $15 / year on a registrar I trust with security a fair bit more.
Reason for a change in paying a little more for a much better (perceived, at least) service was I started getting mails from someone with the (almost same) name suggesting I 'give' him my domain name (and Twitter, and Gmail, and LinkedIn, etc). Give him. As 'I was not using it'. Despite having it as primary email address for ~15 years and a small placeholder page for namecard, logins, ssh, personal projects, cloud hosting, etc. Persistent, timed emails, every 6 months or so. And he was in SEO so perhaps somewhat cluefull of dark arts, so move to a non-cheapest registrar.
If you're on the reverse, check your registrar is providing a secure service, for example passwords not (or seeming to be, based on login hints), in plain text.
My last name is shared with about 8 people in my country, so I managed to snag lastname.ca and now my email is firstname@lastname.ca (but I still own firstname@firstnamelastname.com which is a mouthful.) lastname.com is parked but it keeps getting renewed shortly before it expires. Both domains cost around $10/yr
I reached out to the owner of my name.com and we agreed on $100. He wanted $4000 but when he realized that I just wanted to host a personal site he was happy taking $100.
I tried lastname.email but had trouble validating the address first@lastname.email at a lot of places. Lucked out though and found a tld with the last two letters of my last name, now I'm first@lastna.me and I think it's slick. Hard as hell to explain to customer service reps that there's no '.com' at the end of it though.
I'd probably pay up to $500 but really it's all up to you.
I registered firstnamelastname.com a few years ago which was fortunite as there a few of my name about. Someone later registered my local county domain and used to putting heavy religious stuff on it so I regret not buying that one too now as occasionally people confuse .com and the country domain.
I originally tried to find lastname.com, but that was already taken. So I got lastname.me. Now my email is firstname@lastname.me. Later on I registered firstnamelastname.com and fistnamelastname.me just to be safe.
The .me domains are more expensive, but I really like them for use as a personal domain. I pay $75/y for three domains.
I got it a long time ago, so just ~$10/year for over a decade.
I did once get contacted by one of my dopppelnamers, who happened to be the lead guitarist of an 80's one-hit wonder band (and now solo), but I didn't want to give it up.
I have the .com, but he dominates SEO for our name.
I think I just paid the regular .com amount from when I first registered it 10 years or more ago.
My surname also ends in BY so I recently bought a Belorussian domain for it so my website is [firstname].[partofsurname].by and email address is [firstname]@[partofsurname].by
FirstnameLastname.com was taken so I registered firstname-lastname.com ($8 back then). Though, I'd waited for 3 years for FirstnameLastname.com to expire and when it happened I grabbed it.
It depends on how common your name + lastname is. I have a very common first name + last name among Indians and plenty at silicon valley but I got mine few years back at my registrar for $13 per year.
I picked $firstname.$localTLD in 1999, at the time I had to use register.com and I paid $79 a year for about five years. Nowadays the pricing is closer to $10.
