Some people wake up after a night on the beers to find they’ve been on a gambling website and are out of pocket, others find shipping acknowledgements for stuff they ordered while pissed, me, I often find I’ve ordered another domain name that sounded like a brilliant idea while down the pub.
I’ve just done a domain name audit across the three accounts I tend to register domains with; Only Domains, 123-Reg and Dataflame. I’ve got 40 of the buggers. To be fair, not all of them are mine, some are for example owned by my wife or, in the case of 3 of them, a rather large Literary Festival, but the point still stands. 40 odd domains is a lot for one individual to have accrued.
Although it’s not that bad, because out of the list, I actively use 7 of them, which doubles to 14 as I tend to get both the .co.uk and the .com if I’m going to be serious. We’ve also got all the kids names as domains too, and if I then take the ones the wife actively uses off the total, that brings me down to about 25 that we need to take a long hard look at.
It could be worse.
Mind you, the seemingly pointless accumulation of domains finally hit pay dirt last year as the wife managed to sell one of the domains she’s held for 5 odd years for £1,500. It was registered with the intention of doing a cookery blog but life really got in the way so it never materialised. In the interim, someone registered a business with the name and then found out the .com and .co.uk domains weren’t available. In the end we sold the .co.uk and .com for quite a bit of money, which I suppose has funded the domain catalogue since day one with plenty of money to spare…
I think part of my obsession with collecting domains stems from my need to compartmentalise my blogging. Way back in the midsts of time I used to own the domain name groovygeezer.com and had a hand coded website up there. It fizzled out though, like a lot of blogs do, as it lacked focus. Now I’ve got quite a broad selection of blogs:
- daddacool.co.uk
- kidsdoretro.co.uk
- doitanyway.co.uk
- iamcurrentlywriting.co.uk
- iamcurrentlyreading.co.uk
And whilst the last two haven’t been updated recently (ie in the last 4-6 years- eek!), the rest are regularly updated because they each target a specific niche or have a theme that makes it easier for me to focus on writing content for them. And I enjoy doing it. I realised a long time ago I’m a thwarted writer, so what better hobby to have eh?
