Ask HN: Do you buy related domains early on (.net, .org, similar spellings)?

[boggles]

When you buy a domain do you buy a lot of related domains (.net, .org and other similar sounding names).

I assume there's a chance that a competitor could buy these and take some traffic from mispellings, etc.

But if you don't know how successful your app is going to be, this can be a lot of upfront expense.

[jacquesm]

Yes, absolutely. It's a lot cheaper than buying them from some guy riding on your coattails a couple of years later.

If 16 bucks decides the go/no go on something like that you are probably looking at a hobby project, not a business.

One way around this problem is to have a bunch of generic domains that you do your first trials on, if you find that something 'has legs' you can always decide at that point to come up with a good name and get a complete set of domains.

It also will help to stop phishers that will use the .net or .org version of your domain in a spam campaign to tell people that their password may have been compromised and other jokes like that.

[MicahWedemeyer]

I'd actually wait a couple months, and then buy in stages.

If you're still working on it after 6 months, get the .net/.org/etc Consider it a present to yourself for crossing that milestone.

I personally don't buy misspellings, but I will get ones that have a phonetic similarity (for instance, we have both doleaf.com and dewleaf.com)

[patio11]

When I started out I owned just the .com, for years.

These days I would seriously buy the big three for so much as a good turn of phrase in a blog post. (If you're going to coin the next "Long Tail", own the domain and you'll own the idea by default.) Registering the big three for two years costs far less than writing a blog post does.

I don't typically worry about typos or adjacent domains unless they're extraordinarily likely to cause confusion (chinesenewyearbingocards.com vs chinesenewyearsbingocards.com -- I bought that after I was incapable of even writing my Apache config without mixing the two of them).

The competitor with every plural variation of my domains can enjoy the extra 10 visits a year he gets from them. I have better things to do with my time.

[matt1]

Earlier this year I worked on a domain name finding site called Domain Pigeon. When I was telling people about it over email or AIM, people kept spelling it "pidgeon" like you would spell "fridge". I bought the domain name domainpidgeon.com and directed it to the actual site.

Kind of ironic, given the site was for finding good domain names...

[nollidge]

Linguists might spell it "pidgin" instead.

[ErrantX]

not always. I usualy grab .com, .co.uk and .net. I get .org if I thikn in the future it might work for a organisation / charity but I dont redirect to the related site.

I dont buy misspellings usually....

What I do do though is if I think of an idea and find a good domain for it I grab the domain; I think I have around 50-80 domain names (not unique; that includes the TLD variants) sat waiting for my projects to go on them.

[dschobel]

equally important these days, register the relevant twitter account

[vabmit]

You have to be careful to do major registrations quickly. I registered the twitter account (made a tweet), registered the facebook account (added only some very basic profile information), and then went to register the Google account only to find out it was already taken. My company name was (random two digit number)[no space](uncommon word). I did extensive searches in Google and other places before I decided to use it.

It was probably the tweet that got me into trouble. I'm kicking myself for not realizing that would happen before hand.

I should have registered everything (including the domains) as quickly as I could (in near immediate succession). Only after that should I have started tweeting or filling out any information beyond what was required to establish ownership over the accounts.

Now, I'm sure there's someone out there who hopes to either sell me the google account, or attempt to use the google account for financial fraud.

[bigmac]

I recently did this exact thing for an upcoming venture -- didn't want anyone beating us to it.

[georgekv]

Similarly, registering the facebook account couldn't hurt.

[petesalty]

I used to buy all of them but these days I usually go .com, .net and .org. I'll also do any spellings that I think are useful. For example, I have a Twitter app that uses a bot under the username glu. I was originally going to call the app gluenote but I thought people might have an easier time with the name if it was directly related to the Twitter name so I got both gluenote and glunote. It turned out to be a good decision. For the $8 I think it's worth it.

[liranbaron]

It's pretty cheap to buy domain names so if you have the $20-$30 to buy the domains do it. Why not.

Much better than to have somebody see you, recognize potential and buy your other domains and then demand some $15M for it. Of course the odds of this happening are quite low, but nevertheless, in the event that you make it it's a small price to pay to avoid the future headache.

[covercash]

Don't forget the WWWDOMAIN.COM typo... I think TechCrunch recently had a story about that.

edit: Yah, it was TC that had the story... just visit http://wwwtwitter.com to check it out.

[timcederman]

I quite like seeing what showed up on cederman.net (I've had cederman.com for 10 years now)

[cbz]

I'd buy all at once, i won't pay extra for something i'm getting at lowest price.

[axod]

I'd always buy .com+.net+.org+.co.uk The rest aren't that big a deal.

[DanHulton]

Why .co.uk? Is it actually that popular, or is this UK bias?

Like for myself, would I replace .co.uk with .ca?

[axod]

oh sorry, slight bias (I'm in the UK), also I thought that if you search on google.co.uk it gives some preference to .co.uk domains.

[simonk]

Same if you search google.ca it gives better for .ca domains.