Niche Switch

Not doing any online business for over a year, I thought taking part in .me domain rush might be, if not a nice restart of online activities, at least a good adrenaline race to take part in.

And……it was.

Out of my two preferred domain registrars, only GoDaddy offered .me TLD.
It took me one hour to finish “registration” of three domains I have chosen. Five minutes for one page load seemed like a record time, ten minutes was not unusual.

One hour later I’m checking same domains on Godaddy. They were still available! Not long after that, email messages with error notices are arriving:
The following domain name has failed to be registered:
BACKUP.ME
Error: BACKUP.ME: cannot register - already registered
(oh well…I wasn’t very original with this one, but it’s good one for demonstration purposes)

Trying my luck with another domain name. Godaddy says it’s registered, main registrar says it’s not.

About two to three hours after the domain rush started, I’m registering another six domains. Order accepted. Soon after, another six emails with error notices.

Another interesting thing, I was able to use a 25% discount coupon on first order with Godaddy. No discount coupons worked for the subsequent orders. No complaints about that, but interesting if they needed to fix something like that during the start / peak hours and not before (unless I’m missing something, like that you can only apply a discount code once a day).

They will refund my $400 in one day.

That brought a great domain name idea.
BorrowFrom.ME !
My one-day interest rates are really low now.

(and yeah, it felt good to be an owner of backup.me, for an hour)