What's In A Name?

If you haven't heard about what happened to my domain name read yesterday's post, although today I have a lot more information on how it all went down. I took a crash coarse on what my rights are as a website owner and learned a lot in one day. You generally have a 30 day grace period after a website expires before it is allowed to be turned over to a 3rd party. In my case with Enom it is 19 days, either way I knew I should have a right to my blog name!

My domain name was purchased through Google apps, and although it was next to impossible to figure out how to get a hold of someone, when I did (via googleclients@enom.com) they were helpful and it turns out I can still get my name back. In fact it was never "as gone" as I thought. So now I own messymom and themessymom and somehow feel like I am playing a game of real life monopoly. The question is where do I go from here?

After consulting a team of experts (my dad and husband), I think I am just going to use this name (messy mom) and try and redirect traffic for the next year with themessymom.com. The damage has already been done, so I might as well just ride the wave all the way through. Like I said yesterday messy mom is the original name I wanted anyway and it could be a valuable piece of property some day. Remember bloggers and business owners your domain name is an investment, learn from my mistake and stay on top of it. For information about poaching and domain expiration policies read this article from ecomputerlaw.com it was very helpful to me.

The good news is I am not a successful blogger (what an ironic sentence). What I mean is that it could have been a lot worse if there had been money or a massive following involved. Although this whole experience has been a bit disheartening I think that in the end I am going to come out knowing more about the internet. Yea! Just what I always wanted! Ha. Not really.



If you follow through blogger you should still be following me if you use another method you may want to change your subscription to www.messymom.com