The Domain Name Game - Tue, 28 Sep 2010

In the very beginning, I decided that “Behold” should be the name of my genealogy program. It gives the right connotation (”Look here and let all your data unfold”) in an almost biblical manner, it is rememberable, it’s short, and it’s a non-copyrightable real word, so I don’t have to be worried about getting sued for using it.

Once you’ve got a name, you’ve got to get a Domain for the website for it. If the name’s Behold, then the seemingly obvious choice is to get “Behold.com”. Well, I tried to do that back in 2001. I contacted the owner of that domain who was sitting on it. I offered her a very good deal, but she was reluctant and didn’t take it. So I went elsewhere. She still has the domain, and it’s just sitting there unused.

In the meantime, I had Behold operating out of www.lkessler.com/behold. I wanted something and found that Behold.ca was available. I snatched it up. And temporarily I redirected it back to my lkessler site.

Several years later, when I wanted to make the Behold alpha available, I wanted it to have its own site. By then I had read that using a generic name like “behold.com” wasn’t necessarily the best idea anyway. Domain names like that are too generic. People don’t know what they are for. Until your brand and the name are synonymous like Xerox, using the name alone is not a good idea.

So I looked for a Domain name that would capture both the name of the program, and the right audience. In 2005 I found that the domain name: beholdgenealogy.com was available. It was perfect - just what I wanted, and I registered it.

I’ve been running off of beholdgenealogy.com for several years now. And I’ve got behold.ca redirected to it. But I’ve always still had my eye for those other Behold domains. I’ve been watching carefully. All the big ones: behold.com, behold.net, behold.org have been taken for years. Theoretically, if the right buyer comes along, they could be worth a fair bit of money. But the product or company would have to be named Behold or the domain would again be too generic and not get the action that would be expected.

Then a few weeks ago, I was surprised to see that the owner of behold.us did not renew their domain. It was heading for the deleted domains list. Soon it would be available. Trying to register a deleted domain is not necessarily an easy thing. If there are competitors for the domain you want, there will be an auction for it, which could turn into a bidding war.

So I put in my backorder for behold.us and was surprised that I got it fairly easily. This will be a nice one to have. I’m sure I’ll still keep beholdgenealogy.com as my main site, but my hobby might be collecting some of the better behold domains and redirecting them to the main site. It will provide a simpler way for people to get there.

And behold.us is interesting. It is both “United States” and “us” (you and me). I might be able to do something with that one day. We’ll see.

It still will take a few days to transfer behold.us over. Once I do, feel free to use it, or behold.ca, or beholdgenealogy.com, or lkessler.com/behold or whatever you’d like to come back to my site.

Or, just type “Behold” into google if you forget. It still shows up, on the first page, in about 9th place.