I had originally registered JackHarner.com about 5 or 6 years ago, when I was first getting started with Web Dev. It was my first domain I ever purchased and was home to some of my early atrocities (For some reason it did get captured by the Wayback Machine).
Jackharner.com from 2013
In early 2016 I was broke as fuck and couldn't pay to renew the domain. Eventually it got deleted from the registry and re-registered and turned into a Chinese ad wall in June of 2016. They obviously weren't getting enough traffic to make any money from my shitty old portfolio that had probably 0 backlinks to it, so they let it expire.
It was then registered by another news aggregate wall in May of 2017.
I saw that it was about to expire this year and was constantly checking the WhoIs to see if it had been deleted again, and I finally got it back just last week!
I'm going to be using as a home for me and all of the things that I do. I have a seperate portfolio at HarnerDesigns.com but I want that to be focused on the Web Design stuff that I do. Where JackHarner.com can showcase all of the many facets of creative type work that I do, and just a place to fuck around on the web.
Jackharner.com Now
Top comments (7)
I let dev.to expire after the first year. I thought I had extended it but the payment didn't go through and I didn't notice. So basically the site was down for a few hours while we scrambled to get in touch with the super-niche registrar who deals with .to domains.
I personally talked on the phone with some guy who basically manually restarted some server that got us back online sooner than if we'd waited for the daily process for how they do it.
That's crazy. I didn't realize .to was actually for the Island of Tonga. Glad you were able to get it back!
That's great! Nothing like the agony of realizing you let a domain expire, and the joy of getting a special domain back.
I used to actively buy/sell domain names, so I definitely have some war stories of letting great names expire due to a general lack of organization.
One name that I used to own -- that I was very fond of -- was Fail.org. This was back when FailBlog.org was a fairly big deal, and it got a bunch of type-in traffic. I also thought it just looked cool. At a certain point, I was busy with another project and strapped for operating cash, so I sold it for a few thousand dollars.
I would gladly buy it back at the same price, if only to have a kooky domain back in the portfolio.
Do you think there's still a market for buying/selling domains? It just seems to me like a crapshoot where you might happen on some domain that a startup needed or whatever.
I never tried reaching out to the previous owners of JackHarner.com for fear that they would know someone wanted it and decide it's worth $20,000 or something and just hold on to it.
There's definitely still a market. There are a few big communities like Namepros.com, and some bigger platforms like NameJet.com, Flippa, and others.
I think it's cooled down a lot, as people increasingly navigate the web through search, social media, etc., and less on type-in traffic. I also think the idea of a "category killer" domain has dropped off since the .COM boom. People are more comfortable with brand names and new extensions (such as .to), and so there's less of an emphasis on "trusting" a company just because it has the best / generic domain name.
I've had a lot of fun domain names in the past. I let zerofucks.co expire (which I used to use exclusively for recruitment purposes) but ironically I couldn't be bothered to renew it and now it's someone else's.
I'm sitting on the.littlest.website with no clue what to do with it, but I plan on making something more interesting out of my favourite hostname, index.html.amidoingthisright.website when I get the chance. For now it's just a pile of deliberate wrongness.
I use notareal.email for email correspondence with people or services I don't like (e.g. throwaway@notatreal.email, noreply@, fakename@, etc.) and surprisingly few reject me... but some do. The interesting thing about that domain is that because I'm using a catchall, I get other people's signups who have put in fake email addresses that match my domain. Turns out there are a lot of odd people out there.
notareal.email is awesome. I've had sites that reject an email just for doing the tagging
jack+[whoeverthefuck]@harnerdesigns.com. I should probably just set up a catch all on that domain, but I'd rather not get all the junk shot to admin@ and webmaster@.