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I spent $35k on a domain
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- passedandfuture 4y agoMakes sense you would want to capture that traffic. But why did d you decide on the .to tld to begin with?
- dazc 4y agoGuessing only the .to was available, for what should have been obvious reasons. He would have been better off starting with some randomword.com and building his brand around that - no fear of mis-spelling and a whole lot cheaper.
- bombcar 4y agoI got a three letter dot net domain for less than $5k so I can't see spending this much on a typo.
- dtagames 4y agoSo the $35k question is, realizing that they bought the wrong TLD to begin with, will the company rebrand as .io?
- johnwheeler 4y agoAm I getting this right? You spent 35K on a 5-syllable .io domain to capture traffic from a twitter account with 43K followers who misspelled your actual domain in a tweet? That can’t be right. In the math you laid out, you have to get 6 subs a year for 10 years on your $600/year plan in order to recoup your investment. Why would this tweet generate leads for 10 years? Why didn’t you figure discounted cash flows into the calculation? Will 36K be worth 36K in today’s money 10 years from now? 10 months from now? And now, your hosting provider is rate limiting your website and returning 429. All this HN traffic is going down the chute. Perhaps you should have spent some of that cash on a more robust hosting plan?
- dsizzle 4y agoWasn’t the first time it was misspelled and wouldn’t be the last
- closewith 4y agoYes. Before reading the Archive.org version someone linked below, I thought from the title that it was a ridiculous course of action, but testimonial.to is just so likely to misspelt that this is probably a good move. Not sure about the cost, though.
- iasay 4y agoThis smells like a beer goggles purchase which is being retrospectively justified.
- eterm 4y agoYes, this doesn't really add up, it's not like a tweet that's gone viral will keep going around, it's safe to say that nearly all the clicks it generated were in the past. It did however let them write this blog post and generate even more interest, but unfortunately they've failed to make sure their blog can handle traffic, another missed opportunity I suspect.
- mintplant 4y agoYou'd be surprised by the half-life of a tweet. I have tweets that are still bouncing around accumulating impressions and engagements half a year after I posted them. There's a self-driving cycle that forms where likes and retweets cause the algorithm to push them out into more people's feeds, which lead to a steady stream of additional likes and retweets, which push them into more people's feeds, and so on.
- paulgb 4y agoAnother way to look at it is that the fact that the tweet made the typo is an indication that other people are likely to make the typo, and this way they don't lose out on those users. .io is probably more memorable than .to. (It's all arbitrary, of course; they're both just unrelated ISO codes. But for whatever reason, .io has become the canonical “the .com was taken” refuge.)
- wtk 4y agoOh my oh my... I'd rather bribe a Twitter employee to edit that tweet
- happy_pancake 4y agoA .com is infinitely better than a .io and 6 letter brandable .coms are way cheaper than 35k
- bidirectional 4y agoWhy would testimonial.com be less than 35k?
- dsalzman 4y agoDid you try contacting the owner of testimonial.com and offering them the 35k??
- D13Fd 4y agoNow that is a good thought. Probably good to use an intermediary though and start at maybe $20k to leave room to negotiate. You never know...
- skellera 4y ago> This website has been temporarily rate limited Irony of losing out on HN traffic this time.
- throwoutway 4y agoShould have spent $350 on a better host
- born-jre 4y agoCF Error => This website has been temporarily rate limited
- moralestapia 4y ago> This website has been temporarily rate limited Huh? Isn't Cloudflare CDN free forever? Is it because its hosted through a Worker?
- karakfa2 4y agocouldn't handle the traffic of I guess 10 people... Please check back later Error 1027 This website has been temporarily rate limited You cannot access this site because the owner has reached their plan limits. Check back later once traffic has gone down.
- bcjordan 4y agoArchive.org version: https://web.archive.org/web/20220625155059/https://testimonial.to/blog/here-is-why-i-spent-35000-dollars-on-a-domain https://web.archive.org/web/20220625155059/https://testimoni... Seems to be Cloudflare Workers rate-limited
- altdataseller 4y agoSounds like they should've spent $35,000 on more servers...
- AdamJacobMuller 4y agoCouldn't afford to upgrade the workers plan after spending 35k on the domain.
- schnebbau 4y agoIt probably would have been better in the long-term to rebrand to a non-dictionary .com Yestimonial.com is for sale and I bet for less than that .io.
- indigodaddy 4y agoHmmm.. Cloudflare’s free tier can’t handle an HN hug? Kinda surprised about that.. not really a great advertisement for their free tier tbh. Edit I see another comment mentioned Workers. Well that is much less surprising. One shouldn’t expect the Workers free tier to handle an HN hug..
- z3t4 4y agoBut the site is safe from dosers
- throw03172019 4y ago> This website has been temporarily rate limited I guess you spent all the money on the domain and not your CloudFlare account.
- pkrumins 4y agoI bought dozens of domain typos for my company. I summarized the results in my blog post https://catonmat.net/domain-typos https://catonmat.net/domain-typos.
- behrlich 4y agotestimonial.io still redirects me to the domain parking site as of right now.
- rendall 4y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20220625131156/https://testimonial.to/blog/here-is-why-i-spent-35000-dollars-on-a-domain https://web.archive.org/web/20220625131156/https://testimoni...
- rendall 4y agoIt makes seems to me, especially since it seems to be a common typo and the price would continue to rise along with the success of his business.
- bluelightning2k 4y agoIs the domain worth 1,000x the cost of a paid CloudFlare account to capture all the traffic you're currently losing
- silisili 4y agoAnd now no money left for an adequate hosting provider.
- alexballas 4y agoMissed an opportunity with the tweet that pointed to a different domain. Now missing an opportunity due to the Cloudflare Workers reaching the free tier limit.
- robtaylor 4y agoJust to be clear "I" is not me in this :) I just thought it was interesting. (Although I have spent a bit more than that on a totally different domain a few years ago, perhaps I should blog that!)
- zython 4y ago>This website has been temporarily rate limited >You cannot access this site because the owner has reached their plan limits. Check back later once traffic has gone down. should have paid a little bit more for hosting then