We do not think that all the good domain names already taken, neither does lockergnome we are posting video of here. The simple fact is that the Internet is here for a long time already and the catchy and good names are already taken, however you can always have an idea of a name and find it available. Or you can use service like Vastus Domains and find that there are some names hanging around for purchase that are unused still – we at Vastus Domains are actually re-selling expired domain names which are left over from previous owners and we are also having good competitive prices to go with one year of renewal fee with GoDaddy.

It is spring time and we at Vastus Domains are having a great spring cleaning with many domains price cuts. Following are the real domain name bargains you cannot find anywhere else. All the domains in this offer are registered with GoDaddy and have a free push to your GoDaddy account included in the price. We are not charging any additional fees or renewals. We are using highly professional GoDaddy Auctions platform for the transaction meaning you will be safe purchasing and transferring your purchases. For any additional questions feel free to contact us at sales@vastusdomains.com

beachfrontbliss.com – US $199.99

Spring is here and the long hot summer is not far away. Prepare your beach experiences whether you want to show off with your latest scuba photos or just write about the feeling this domain name is great for you.

bestfreethings.com – US $199.99

If you yourself have a bargain to offer for this spring time this domain name would be an excellent choice. Offer your free samples of merchandise or you can make a link site to all the best free offerings out there for starters.

houstoncpafirm.com – US $199.99

If you are located in Houston or are targeting Houston audience this domain name is a domain name of choice for anything internet marketing related. You can even start up a company using this domain name.

edoria.com – US $89.99

Does this domain name sound like a fantasy land from Tolkien’s books? Right on, excellent choice for anything RPG related be it just a review site or you are starting your own RPG niche yourself you will not go wrong purchasing this domain name.

bestgiftstore.com – US $89.99

An excellent choice for gift shop online store. Though Easter is behind us the gifts are not that seasonal as you may think, people buy gifts for friends and family all the time, boost your online presence with this exceptional domain name.

vidity.com – US $99.99

Here is an idea name for your start up business. It is catchy and modern, it can fit any type of online presence and since it is not trademarked you can even name your company after the site. A real bargain at that price.

bookkeepernow.com – US $99.99

We all dislike paperwork and tons of different forms we have to fill each and every month in order to keep our business and household in order. Or if you are in the minority enjoying the bookkeeping business this is the bulls eye domain name for your pleasure.

What is a domain name?

A domain name is both the name of virtual estate and a pointer to its contents. For example taking Google.com – you have a catchy name but if popular culture has not taught you, you would probably have no idea what you can expect behind that nice name. On the other hand CheapJackets.com – it is a terrible domain name but you can be sure what you can find when you visit the site. To put it together, a domain name should be recognizible and partly denote its contents too. Good example would be JohnsonJackets.com if you happen to own a business with Johnson in its name and you are selling jackets or similar ware. The domain name is the first thing your visitors or potential customers will see and it is a first impression although some people argue that name is not that important if you have done all the other things right it is better to play safe and be sure that your domain name is good to start with.

Is IP address more important than domain name?

An IP address is like a postal number, it is associated with your domain name contents not the name itself. This means that an IP address is basically irrelevant in contrast to the domain name itself. In fact, if you are not the network administrator, you would have no need to remember or otherwise use an IP address in your normal work flow. Even the recent news of the IP address pool scarcity is just a technical jargon which does not need to concern you. In the near future changes are expected to the postal addresses of virtual real estates of the world but they are going to be transparent and you will only need to type or search for a domain name to get to the new address.

How can I value a domain name?

This is an important question and many people invest and drop an idea of investing on this first step. There are few important factors you need to watch for when you are going to value a domain name. As we have already discussed, domain name should be catchy and it need to show what to expect inside. You might ask how did Google come up all the way with just a catchy name and in 1998 very few people actually knew what does Google do. This is due to popularity boost, and you can also get there in time. However you need to know whether you are going to do a short or long term investment. In case of a short term investment your return will be less and you need to watch for already popular terms for your domain name. For long term investment you can actually get away with just a catchy name and start from there. In both cases, an unknown domain name entity has no measurable value when it is fresh. However if you are to buy already established domain name your initial investment is going to be much higher and you would jump in straight into domain development without need for publicity build up like with a fresh name.

Where can I buy valuable domain names?

For a fresh build up go directly to the source – domain name registrars. Have a notes of few ideas about domain names and see if any of them are free to purchase. Since there are over 80 millions of com domain names alone that are registered nowadays, chances are that you will need to diversify and make shortcuts in aspect of what you would like and what you will get. On the other hand, you can hunt for an expiring or already expired domain name which already has some traction and if it fits in your domain name idea you are in luck. This endeveour can be expensive mind you, because expiring and expired domain names are often auctioned and the prices can be high. We at Vastus Domains have a nice portfolio of domain names with quite affordable prices.

New Google Algorithm

Ever since Google has changed their algorithm of ranking web sites in order to isolate and drop no-content or poor-content sites out of their search result set there has been a lot of fallout from this change. Many sites with natural low content, like listings or news drops, and sites with hardy changing content like most of the companies websites are also being affected by this change having various dubious results showing in top of the search result set for the particular niche. This has resulted in a decrease of visitors and traffic for many affected websites and SEO experts were searching a viable methods to boost otherwise legitimate sites back up.

Social Networking – SEO of the new age

Social networking has its prime time nowadays. Everybody and their grandmother has a Facebook or Twitter account or both. Beside those big players in the field many small networking sites are also receiving the attention. In the mentioned Google change the social networking sites results are also being affected and in a good way too. Meaning having a social network connections for your business is a must if you are any serious of increasing your visitor base, returning visitor base and in end effect customer base. By some statistics large number of people do not even search anymore by using conventional methods of using search engines, they do their searches directly in Facebook or Twitter. This has changed the play field a lot and if you have not already, it is five past midnight to act in this department.

Twitter account – name your business or name your keywords

The easiest and most effective way to jump into the social networking bandwagon and to not increase your operating costs is to open a Twitter account. The best way is to use your business name itself as an account name. Some researchers say that the account name itself acts like a page title for Google et al. Since Twitter accounts do not allow spaces make sure to capitalize letters properly (for example our business Twitter account is VastusDomains). Since the popularity of Twitter is increasing and the method of using Twitter account for company promotion is not new, chances are that the company name you are trying to register as Twitter account is already taken. If this is the case you have two possibilities; either find out who the current owner is and if this is an individual or a Twitter squatter, you could just email Twitter support to have your account company name registered to you if they see your claim as valid (trademark or otherwise). However if the registrant of Twitter account is another company or a legitimate individual you would have to work your way around the problem. The best solution in this case is to find out what are the most searched key phrases for your business, if you hold any kind of statistics on your website visitors this should be easy to find out. Once you see the best possible keywords for your business offering, make up a Twitter account name for it.

Twitter – post fresh and post often

The account registration is not where your Twitter journey ends. If you do not have a company blog or news feed you have to seriously reconsider your SEO efforts first. Having at least a news feed or best offers feed is a must. Once you do, update your Twitter with the content from your blog or other feed at least once a day. I would advice against any kind of automatic posting or followers gathering because this would hurt you in the long run. In the beginning follow the industry niche you are in and once you get yourself a follower, follow him back. This is the best way of naturally gathering followers. Once the train starts and your Twitter page updates daily your followers will flow in from itself. Also effects of social networking are not often transparent in your visitor statistics, note that if you are getting popular you will see surges or pikes then sharp declines, this is quite normal. However in few weeks time you should see your twitter account page showing up in Google and ranking high.

Following the recent events when hackers broke into CA digital certificate house and practically performed man-in-the-middle attack on the unsuspecting customers of mostly Iranian Gmail accounts I thought it would be nice to have a “what-is” article about the CA and digital certificates in general so we can learn and grow on the subject.

What is a CA?

CA is a short of Certificate Authority, a company calling itself a CA is a registered entity for issuing digital certificates. The important aspect to remember regarding the CA is that every operating system used today has its own internal list of authorized CA in order to have them contacted about the digital certificate they see in the network traffic. If this were not the case, there would be no point in issuing digital certificates because there would be no authority to say that this certificate is valid and that it does represent the web resource it claims to. In order for a company to establish itself as a CA there are numerous steps to follow and many resources and funds to spend. This is normal because if you want to trust someone without questioning that someone has to prove its worthiness first. Every CA has a link to the upper management CA which has the CA in their list of authorized digital certificates issuers meaning that everyone has their watcher and watcher has a watcher too. This goes all up to the registry level where final word is given and only a handful of CAs are in that list.

Digital Certificate

Every time you visit secure site there are few steps your browser performs to authenticate that the resource you are fetching is the resource it claims to be. I would not go too much into technicality suffice it to say that your browser has a method to establish secure network connection exchanging your random generated private key with publicly available server key of a secured resource. This process ends with digital certificate which server sends to our browser – it is like a passport with bio-metric data. This passport among the data identifying the resource (web site) and their business or organization has an upper level authority link where your browser can verify the bio-metric data if it is correct. This is where your operating system CA list is being queried as a first step, if upper level CA is not in that list your browser will issue a warning or an alert. If the CA is in your operating system list then browser does issue a verification request to that CA to prove that digital certificate is correct – this is called second level authentication. In the nutshell the whole process is transparent to you and you will see a lock icon on the site secured by a digital certificate in your browser if every check pass your browser issue is correct.

Extended Digital Certificate

Have you seen twitter.com on secure connection? If you look closely this secured connection has an add-on where twitter.com is identified by a real company name, location and other company information and your browser is displaying green address bar or a green info box beside it showing this company information. This is called extended digital certificate and the crucial difference to a normal digital certificate is that it has additional data in the passport identifying ownership of the web site or web resource. Your browser still use its CA list to identify if this data is correct on a second level like with normal digital certificate. However extended digital certificate issuer require more information and more proof of the holder in order to have them authenticated. This in the nutshell means that if you have completely green address bar – or in some browser extra information beside the address bar usually also green – you click on that info you will see the real company information behind the web resource. It is an added assurance that the web resource is the real thing.

The summer is almost over and we at Vastus Domains are having a major summer sale with many domains price cuts. For your reading pleasure I am going to display the most quality in domain names we have to offer for pennies.

dublinwriters.com – US $19.99

Great domain name for starting your own blog even more if you are going to write about Ireland or you are living in Dublin. The name is general enough to host any type of Ireland/Dublin related information and it contains keyword phrase which has a high search hit on the search engines.

thefoodcalendar.com – US $24.99

An excellent domain name for starting an informational or blog site related to food or eating disorders in general. Suitable for advices about eating habits and diets and excercise. Food is among most searched term on the Internet.

uneautrehistoire.com – US $24.99

French wording for a history site. A highly searched term in the french speaking countries – we are seeing hundreds of hits per day on this domain name landing page.

yourmusicblog.com – US $24.99

Music is the essence of many people lifes and thus it is the high traffic keyword on the internet search engines. Writing a blog about music is easy, you just need the right blog name – here is one for a bargain price.

visa-tour.com – US $24.99

This domain name is best suited for an informational or shop site containing touristic related information or tours. Visa is registered trademark but this domain name is not making it an excellent low price deal for anything you can imagine selling with Visa card.

thecompletemanager.com – US $24.99

If you have skills as a manager or an organizing skill you can start a blog on this highly searched keyword phrase and have both fun writing your experiences and earn money on the traffic this domain would bring you.

All the domains in this offer are registered with GoDaddy and have a free push to your GoDaddy account included in the price. We are not charging any additional fees or renewals. We are accepting Visa, Mastercard, Diners and American Express. You can also purchase domain name ownership with your PayPal. For any additional questions feel free to contact us at sales@vastusdomains.com

It is not just a web newcomer who is being confused when trying to register the domain name, soon to find out that there are differences between domain name registrar, domain name registry and domain name web hosting. In the nutshell the things are quite simple and straightforward however many companies have multiple services offered including domain name registrar and web site hosting thus adding to the confusion.

Domain Name Registry

This is the top level registry service where all the domains belonging to top level extension (COM or NET for example) are being registered. In the today’s Internet we are seeing two major modes of operation of top level domain registry; thick and thin mode. Thick registry is for example ORG registry – thick means that the registry does hold all the domain names of the top level ORG including registrant information and contact data, it is all being held on the same one point access registry. Thin on the other hand are COM and NET – thin means that there are only rudimentary information (like expiration and creation date) being held by the registry and a pointer to the registrar holding rest of the information including registrant information and contact data. In the layman terms – as a domain owner you do not need to concern yourself about top level domain registry at all.

Domain Name Registrar

There are many domain name registrars present in the Internet space. Domain name registrar is a company providing service of domain name registration to its registrants. It actually does lease a domain name to the registrant on the period from one to ten years for a registration fee. Registrars are paying top level domain registry nominal annual fee for each registration (for COM and NET domains top level domain registry is Verisign) and are adding operating costs plus profit on this price thus forming the price of the annual fee to their end users aka registrants. Since the competition is fierce the prices you can as a domain owner get are ranging from US $10 to the astronomical US $20 per year. We at Vastus Domains are using GoDaddy registrar exclusively and once you purchase domain name from us you can enjoy great annual renewal prices of US $12 and less. In the layman terms – as a domain owner you should explore your options and choose the registrar you are most comfortable with, take the price of registration renewal, customer support and ease of setup into account.

Domain Name Hosting

Domain name is registered with domain name registrar who only does point domain name to a specific place (server) where your pages and data do actually reside. This specific place is your hosting provider. Web hosting is a service provided by companies where they have your data, be it a web page or email, stored on their server hardware and served to the visitors. The latest marketing buzz in the hosting world is the cloud services and the most used type of hosting is shared hosting where many small websites reside on one large server sharing its resources. Hosting expenses are normally calculated on a monthly basis and they include different metrics like processor power, bandwidth and data storage space. It is not easy to choose the right hosting for your needs so you need to make your research before you jump in. For hosting provider to be good, it has to be affordable, have good reach from different geographic locations (or not, depending if you are on to the local traffic this is not an issue) have a good up-time or more importantly short down-time (it is better to choose the hosting which can handle problems quickly when happened than to choose hosting with 99% up-time guarantee and have your server down for 12h until they fix that 1% problem).  In the layman terms – hosting is much more important service you need for your web site than registrar so choose carefully and explore your options first.

Domain Name Servers

This is the link between where your domain name is registered and where your actual web site data lies. Domain Name Servers are updated by the registrar to point your web site name resolution to the hosting you are using. Every registrar has a panel where you can set domain name servers to the ones you are using.

Conclusion

1. Domain name registrar is the place where your domain name is registered
2. Domain name registrar points to your web site hosting using domain name servers
3. Domain name hosting is the place where your data is being held
4. Registrar and web hosting have nothing in common although there are many companies providing both
5. You can have your domain name registered with one company and hosting it with another

Domain name investing is a pretty young investing branch being it hardly teenage. In this state, the market is expected to be very volatile and speculative. However if played right and invested properly this market can have a great return of an investment and nice profit chunk. The market is immature and there are many problems and issues but there are already some ground rules set up and if one does not stray much from the path the investment can be as secure as any other mature market investment.

Early years

Ending the 20th century domain names were quite expensive in contrast to the prices nowadays. Big players have hold the large chunk of domain names portfolio and the interest in the online business has only just sparked. First rise and fall in the online industry with the year 2000 dot com bubble burst has been the first test of market sustainability, many analysts have prognosis that market will not survive and that few niche business ventures would stay and that nobody in their right mind would invest in domain names or websites in the near future because of the long term insecurity. The doom prognosis has proven to be wrong and due to technology advances and having more than 60% of world population online, the market for domain names continued to grow after the great fall of dot com bubble burst.

Dot com bubble burst

The dot com bubble burst happened due to small and big time investors pouring money in unsustainable online business ventures without the real exit strategy or even liquid strategy. It was all in the buzz and suddenly everyone and their grandmother have had a website selling something or showing off. Saturation of the market has brought interested buyers to a minimum price range either for products or online advertising. In this scenario the big numbers game gained the market over night leaving only big names who could survive with cents over a dollar profit margins afloat. Many small businesses and family businesses having a bite in the online market cake have been bankrupted and left in the dark without means to rise back up. This whole situation has made the future decade very cautious for investors and especially for small businesses and family business alike.

Opportunity

What many saw as a failing business model others saw as a great opportunity. In the following decade since the dot com bubble burst the online businesses left afloat and new investors and idea inception makers have earned the big bucks due to the same state of investment fear left by the market downfall. Nowadays it is prudent to have an online presence if you are running a business, the profit margins on your online sales are bigger, the customer support is easier to accomplish and the maintenance costs of an online shop is hundred if not thousand times lower than the real world venture. To start an online venture the first thing you are going to need is a domain name. This is where domain investors are kicking in having already large portfolios of domain names and profiting from their maturity or phrase visibility. You can still make a good deal buying a domain name because the name itself is nothing if not backed up with good website, the domain name is just the first step. There is no need to invest thousands or millions in domain name itself when you can build a brand on a hundred dollar worth of domain name just as well.

We at Vastus Domains are re-sellers, we are buying opportunity non trademark infringing domain names and offering those to end buyers for a profit. We have a strong belief in the business ethics and have all our customers covered with answers ranging from beginner’s “whats the difference between domain name registrar and hosting” to more advanced ones. Since we are a small company with four employees we are flexible and can adjust to market needs as we go. Although owning few hundred domain names in our portfolio we are not considering ourselves domainers. And here is why.

What is a domainer

In the modern slang a domainer is a person or a company who has large portfolio of domain names offered for a sale or future development. This broad description can be tagged to just every large quantity domain name holder out there. What in nutshell differentiates a domainer is that he or she has his domain names on sale either stealthy by pretending that the domain name in question is valuable to him thus driving the price up or directly advertising the sale on numerous auction sites and domain name forums. Domainer seldom talks about the domain portfolio he holds and tries to be as close to a single domain owner as he possibly can in order to make a sale. Domainer also holds often ridiculous price tag on his domain names without any real value to the domain name itself in hope to meet the buyer who will unsuspectingly purchase for that price tag. It is not uncommon that domainer holds onto a domain name for years even decades without making that killer sale, in the meantime paying renewal fees and possible making a mini site on the name in order to boost interest. While he or she does hold onto his very valuable and “has-to-have” domain name, domainer is an active member of domainer community posting various domain name industry related and unrelated facts and fiction all around the web – all in the sense of self and his domain names sale promotion.

How is a domainer different than a re-seller

Both domainers and domain name re-sellers are having the same business model. Buying off domain names of interest and selling them for a profit. This is where all similarities stop. Domainers are not honest about their business model, they act as if they have the domain name they are selling is in their ownership for decades left over to them by a rich uncle. They never do link their domain name portfolio or are able to present it because this would hurt their attempt to sell that one particular domain name to a potential buyer. And of course the price tag of such a domain name is thousand, ten thousand or even hundred thousand dollars. Aside from a few dozen domain names which are really worth that much there are no such pumped virtual property for which you should shell out hundred thousand dollars. The problem with internet and computers in general is that too many people are not educated enough and are uninformed so the market for such high pumped virtual real estate exist in the first place. For comparison, re-sellers are holding prices with a many times smaller profit margin than domainers  added to  natural costs involving domain name maintenance and the initial acquisition. This is where domainers are starting calling names and discussion is heating up in the domainers community because domainers think their domain names are worth every penny they are asking and that re-sellers are bottom feeders selling garbage names to general populace. In practice domain name re-sellers are honest about their business model, have a direct payment methods, hold a good BBB rating and have a customer support.

Elitist attitude

Domainers are frequent on all of the popular domaining industry forums usually bragging about ethics and business practice. In reality all they are doing is sitting on their over priced domain names and waiting for a victim to sell to. When you end up in a discussion with a domainer you will see a clear attitude problem backed up with numerous fellow domainers jumping in the same thread like hyenas to rip you and your point apart in every possible way. No matter the topic domainers are there like an elitist family above everything in domaining industry, they feel a need to have the final word on everything domain names relating and are giving advice to beginners left and right. The above everything attitude is clear and common denominator on each and every domainers forum out there.

GoDaddy is the largest domain name registrar in the world with the current statistics showing more than 45 million domain names registered to it. Its closest competitor is four times smaller by the number of domain names registered. Company has been founded in 1997 and at the time its founder Bob Parsons has had a business plan of making a software company under the name Jomax Technologies. GoDaddy name was brainstormed in 1999 by Jomax Technologies employees seeking more recognizable brand name for the company. GoDaddy has been acquired by KKR and Silver Lake Partners on July the 1st 2011 for a sum of US $2.25 billion.

NoDaddy gripe site

As with any successful business GoDaddy was not immune to disgruntled customers and former employees. NoDaddy has been founded by a disgruntled customer who has had his domain name blocked by the registry on the complaint from GoDaddy under the ICANN rules. NoDaddy started as a simple rant site where this customer has expressed his anger of GoDaddy practice and the inability to express his point of view or even defend himself in the mentioned domain blockage case. Soon thereafter handful of former GoDaddy employees and other angry customers started posting on the NoDaddy open forum about their experiences. This in end has achieved that NoDaddy site has ranked in search engines, Google in particular, in top results for a GoDaddy query making very bad PR for GoDaddy itself. Despite efforts in SEO field and hiring numerous experts in order to solve the issue with NoDaddy, the site was still alive and kicking and spreading its feedback. Some argue that negative feedback NoDaddy has had even helped PR of GoDaddy itself hence they had nothing to lose just let it be. The interesting fact is that NoDaddy site was actually registered with GoDaddy registrar but legally GoDaddy could not do anything to disable it – they haven’t stepped on any trademark and if they would have been shut down disruptively they could have a case in court with 1st amendment.

New GoDaddy owners

Soon after the acquisition of GoDaddy the new owners have had made a deal with NoDaddy owners and basically bought them of – the GoDaddy spokesman has not confirmed that this is the actual case but he did confirm that they have made an acquisition. I am not certain why Bob Parsons hasn’t come to the same idea or maybe he did but the price NoDaddy owners were asking was too high. In any case, for undisclosed sum, GoDaddy is now the legal owner of NoDaddy site and NoDaddy previous owner is nowhere to be found to comment on this according to The Register. The site itself does not resolve to a webpage anymore and most probably the contents of all the forum posts and negative feedback have been deleted. In my opinion they could have just redirected the site back to GoDaddy to catch all the traffic it has been receiving.

Is there any truth in NoDaddy feedback

We at Vastus Domains have been with GoDaddy for some time now and have had zero problems with the site, domain name registrations, transfers or customer support. This however does not mean there aren’t problems and that all customers are happy with GoDaddy. With a large enterprise like GoDaddy is there have to be issues, the question is are the issues dealt with swiftly and in a professional manner. NoDaddy feedback has claimed that this was not the case and that there are numerous problems with GoDaddy. Whether the feedback was trustworthy is questionable especially now when they have sold the site to the exact target of their complaints.