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Ask Slashdot: What Is the Best Way To Hold Onto Your Domain?

Posted by samzenpus on from the what's-mine-is-mine dept.

An anonymous reader writes: There have been quite a few stories recently about corporations, or other people, wanting to take over a domain. This has me wondering what steps can I take to ensure that outsiders know that my domain is in use, and not up for sale. In my case, I registered a really short domain name(only 5 characters) for a word that I made up. The domain has been mine for a while, and Archive.org has snapshots going back to 2001 of my placeholder page. It could be close to other domain names by adding one more letter, so there is potential for accusations of typosquatting (none yet). I have no trademark on the word, because I saw no reason to get one. The domain is used mostly for personal email, with some old web content left out there for search engines to find. The hosting I pay for is a very basic plan, and I can't really afford to pay for a ton of new traffic. There is the option to set up a blog, but then it has to be maintained for security. What would other readers suggest to establish the domain as mine, without ramping up the amount of traffic on it?

1 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. It doesn't always end with lawyers, guns and money by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I was involved in one case where a big company wanted to buy a domain name. The domain owner had done a number of things right -- posted real content about his business on it, and number of things wrong -- indicated that the domain was for sale.

    The corporate lawyer looked into the situation and thought that they could win the rights to the domain in court. However, reasonably enough the lawyer indicated that it would probably cost more than it would take to just buy the domain. At the end of the day, the company agreed to pay up to $10,000 for the domain (the owner settled for about $7,000).

    The lawyer's reasoning was that the fight would be messy, maybe cost more than $10,000 (in effort and time) and might lose. Also, the potential for bad publicity and pissing off the community didn't make business sense.

    The system sort of worked. In the end, everyone got what they wanted. The domain owner got a reasonable payout without too much effort (switching his domain wasn't that hard, and the corporation agreed to forward the email for six months or longer if needed), the company got the domain it wanted, no one got pissed off and no animals were injured.

    Sometimes things work out for the better.