Well, it’s been a long time (10 years) with Network Solutions but I’ve finally gotten off my lazy butt and moved my domains over to GoDaddy. The primary reason was to get away from paying $35 a year per domain and bring it down to closer to ten bucks a year. A little effort to save a little money.
There will be only one casualty in the transfer: the history. There isn’t much documented in the Network Solutions registration but I always enjoyed being able to go look at the whois record for doe.com and find the registration date. I guess I’ll have to turn to this blog entry to reminisce from now on.
Doe.com – Record created on 27-Jul-1995
Along with this date I might as well record the story behind the registration.
Before working at Microsoft I had a job at a small “start-up” (it wasn’t starting, so I use the term “start-up” loosely) named ResNova Software, Inc. ResNova’s primary product was a BBS which, among other things, had functionality to aggregate Usenet newsgroups. Back then there was far less garbage in the newsgroups but there was, strangely enough, a large number of posting from some “John Doe” fellow with the address john@doe.com. Being the curious sort I decided to investigate who owned doe.com… turns out no one did. Being the mischievous sort I decided to register it (domain names were free back then… I’m also the cheap sort). I used to periodically check the account and respond to the occasional “are you real?” or “test” e-mail messages (and they were occasional). The account was also useful when I was a test lead on Outlook Express and Entourage for the Macintosh, lots of spam to throw at the product. Sadly, I can no longer play celebrity as john@doe.com is overrun with e-mail. Surprisingly the bulk of the mail is no longer spam, it’s bounce messages from all the test mail, junk mail and virus mail purporting to be from john@doe.com. John@doe.com can receive around 250 bounce messages per minute (my previous ISP threatened to kick me off his servers because just the mail connection attempts to john@doe.com were melting his servers, there weren’t even any accounts set up).
Today doe.com is mainly a traffic generator for my blog. People show up randomly looking for either the U.S. Department of Energy (which was doe.gov but is now energy.gov but still didn’t register energy.com, genius!) the Doe Fund (doe.org) and, at one time, the Canadian Department of Environment (which used to be www.doe.ca but appears to be no longer, it’s moved on, it’s an ex-site…*). Just for grins I let my online life flow into the real world, my Volvo station wagon has the custom plate “doe com” (if you came here because I cut you off on the freeway, I honestly apologize… it had nothing to do with you, I’m just impatient and meant no offense).
The info above covers just about everything, but it doesn’t answer the most frequently asked question: “Is Doe.com for sale?” The answer is, “yes”, of course, everything has its price. Each time I’m asked I sit down and seriously consider selling the domain name. I don’t, after all, have a mail server set up, I don’t use the domain name as the identity of my web site and even the traffic it generates is nothing but a cost to me. Why not sell? Turns out I’m very sentimental and really don’t want to sell it, but because everything has to have a price I’ve set the price at an $3 Million to cover legal fees, taxes and, of course, pain and suffering for the loss. I figure that amount is suitably ridiculous to drive off almost all buyers and if someone does come along willing to pony up the ridiculous fee (heck, it’s a three-letter, easy to spell .com domain) I’ll take the money, give half to Uncle Sam, buy something really nice for my wife and put the rest in the bank for retirement.
Oh, I’ll spend a little on my car too, I need new tires for my Volvo… they don’t seem to last for some reason. Must be something wrong with the car.
* Much love and many apologies to John Cleese
Note from Reeves to Reeves: Before moving the WhoIs showed “Little.org – Record created on 10-May-2002”. I know the domain is older than that but I’ll have to do some research to find out when I first registered it.
