One of my visitors wrote to say "The domain I want appears to be available. but the registrar want $3.5K to register it. Is there any way around the ridiculous price?" This article addresses the question.
To make sure that we are talking about the same thing, a "domain name" (in this context) is essentially the address of your website. For example, the domain of the site you are currently reading is "thesitewizard.com". If you type the latter into a browser, you will end up at the main page of this site. You obtain such a web address by going to a registrar and buying one. People typically get a domain prior to setting up a website, although there are some who get it for the purpose of having an email address at their own domain.
When you go to a registrar, and type in the domain that you want, and the registrar's page says that it is available, but lists it at a prohibitively expensive price, it probably means that the domain has already been bought by someone else. The reason the registrar says it's available is because the current owner is willing to part with it for the amount listed.
Note that when I say "prohibitively expensive", I mean that the domain is listed at a price significantly above the usual price of such domains. For example, over the years, I have had numerous visitors complain to me about encountering astronomically high prices. One said that their desired name was listed at USD $5,000, and another, just recently, at "4 grand". In other words, I'm not referring to differences of a few dollars/pounds from the figures I mentioned. Small differences are merely the fluctuations which occur all year, every year, with every registrar, probably due to the intense competition in this industry.
So what can you do?
Since the domain is already taken, you cannot just go to another registrar and hope to get it there at a cheaper price. If you do, and the domain owner has not listed it for sale with the second registrar, it will tell you it's not available, since the name already belongs to someone.
The best solution, in my opinion, is to think of another name and try that instead. You will probably have better luck finding an unused name if you make up a word that doesn't exist in the dictionary. Do NOT buy a temporary domain name to use until your hoped-for name becomes available. That is folly. Read the article linked to here if you don't know why.
If your company is already associated with that particular name, because you have been calling it that way for years, and have established it as your brand, then you have a slight problem. Since the current owner is willing to sell the name, one solution is to fork out the cash and buy it. Another alternative is to think of a variation of the name, and buy that instead. For example, if the domain you want is "example.com", but it's taken, try "ExampleCompany.com" or the like. But if you take this route, as I wrote elsewhere, you will need to make sure that you always refer to your site with its full name, "ExampleCompany.com", and not just "Example", or you will have people going to the wrong site when they are looking for you.
One visitor implied that he considered avoiding the whole mess by simply using an IP address for his website.
For those who aren't sure what this is, an IP address is a series of numbers like "127.0.0.1". Although humans use domain names like "thesitewizard.com" to go to websites, the underlying software on the Internet rely on IP addresses to find the sites. The domain you type into your browser is translated under-the-hood to an IP address.
There are at least 2 problems with using an IP address that I can think of at the moment. (There may be more, but even these two alone are enough to indicate that it is not a good solution.)
Depending on how your website is hosted, a single IP address may be shared by many sites. The web server figures out which site is requested by looking at the domain name furnished by a web browser in a hidden field (or, more accurately, if we were to use the actual technical term, in a header).
When you change web hosts, your website will get a new IP address. In fact, even if you don't move to a different web host, there may be circumstances (for example, if they switch network providers) when your host will need to assign your site a different IP address. In such a situation, without a domain name, your site is effectively dead. Yes, it will now exist at a new address, but your visitors and the search engines won't be able to find it automatically without your help.
This is one of the problems that a domain name solves. Even if you change web hosts, your visitors will still reach you at the same web address. If you don't specifically inform your visitors that you have moved to a different host, they won't even know that anything has changed.
Other solutions that have been suggested to me, but will not work the way you think, are addressed in my articles Can I Be My Own Domain Name Registrar So That I Can Avoid Paying Domain Renewal Fees Every Year? and Can you register a domain name directly with ICANN instead of through a middleman?
From experience, I'm fairly certain that the above answers are not really what my visitor wanted to hear. Most people want a special solution that somehow gives them the name they thought of originally without having to pay a hefty price for it. But as I said above, such a high price means that the domain has already been sold. You are too late. If you still want it, you have to see if the current owner is willing to sell it. And they obviously are, provided you are willing to pay the price they offered. It's a free market. They can set the price of something they own, and you can choose to accept it or not. You may be in their shoes in the future, when you (say) decide to retire from your online business and want to sell your domain.
Personally, though, I feel that if you don't already have a brand that you want to maintain, just think of a new name. It's cheaper, and you avoid any potential baggage (eg, bad reputation) that comes with a domain that someone else once used.
Copyright © 2020 Christopher Heng. All rights reserved.
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What to do if a registrar quotes an exorbitant price for a domain
