Domains Bought for Ideas That Never Happened

How the list grows

A domain costs little and takes two minutes to buy, so one gets bought whenever an idea does: a second location, a product line, a spring promotion, a catchier name somebody suggested over lunch.

Most of the ideas never happen. The domains stay, renewing every year on whatever card was used at the time.

A few years later nobody can say how many there are, which registrar holds them, or which matter.

It is worth fixing, and mostly it takes a list.

Where the domains are hiding

• Renewal emails in the inboxes of current and former staff.
• Card statements showing charges from registrars and hosting companies.
• Past designers and marketers who registered names on the business's behalf.
• The hosting account, which may list domains parked on it.
• Printed material: brochures, vehicle lettering, signs and old ads.
• Personal accounts where an owner bought a name late one evening.

The last is the easiest to miss, since nobody else in the business knows the account exists. Ask the owners directly, and check their personal email for renewal notices.

Make one list

One row per domain: the name, the registrar, the login, the expiry date, whether it renews automatically, the card it renews on, and what it does now.

What it does now has a short set of answers: the main site, a redirect to the main site, a parked page, email, or nothing.

Add one more column, the hardest to fill: whether the address has ever appeared in public, on paper, on a vehicle, in an email signature or in a link from another site.

That column decides most of what follows.

The domains worth keeping

The main domain, obviously, and its close relatives: the .com if you trade on the .ca, or the other way round, and the misspelling customers actually type.

Any domain that was ever printed. Brochures and fridge magnets outlive campaigns by years, and lettering on a truck can outlive the plan it was painted for.

Any domain that ever carried email. Mail keeps arriving at old addresses long after people stop using them, and some of it matters.

And the business name itself in one or two other endings, if someone trading on it would cause real confusion. One or two, not every variation on offer.

The domains to let go

Names bought for a plan that has been dropped, and never printed, used for email or linked to.

Keyword names bought because someone said they would help with search. A domain with no history that simply redirects to the main site adds nothing to its ranking.

Names bought in case a competitor wanted them, which is rarely the threat it seemed at the time.

A domain for an idea that might still happen can stay, with a review date beside it, so that keeping it is a decision rather than a habit.

What happens after a domain lapses

An expired domain does not vanish. After a grace period and a redemption period it goes back on the open market for anyone to buy.

Names with any history are often picked up quickly, by resellers or by people who fill them with ads, and whatever still points there goes to them: old links, printed brochures, people typing an address they remember.

Email is the more serious risk. The new owner of a lapsed name can set up mailboxes on it and collect whatever arrives, password resets included, for any account that was opened with an address there.

So before letting a domain go, move every account that uses an address on it.

A worked example

A bin rental company with four trucks and a yard on the edge of town had been paying for twelve domains for eight years.

There was one for each of five suburbs it served, bought on advice about search. There was a name for a junk removal service the owner had considered and dropped, a .com for a spring cleanup promotion, and two misspellings.

The list took an afternoon, mostly spent searching an old inbox. It found two registrars, three cards, one of them expired, and a domain nobody could explain.

The spring cleanup address was lettered on the side of the newer bins, which sit in driveways for a week at a time. It stayed, redirecting to the rentals page.

One suburb domain turned out to carry the email address the company used to log in to its fuel card account. That login moved to the main domain before anything else changed.

The rest were set not to renew, with their expiry dates in the calendar. The main domain, its .com and the cleanup address now sit in one account in the company's name.

Letting it expire on purpose

Turn off automatic renewal and note the expiry date. Do not leave the decision to a declined card.

A few weeks before the date, remove the domain from your email service and take down any redirect you no longer need.

Search the main site, invoices, forms and email signatures once more for the old address.

Then let the date pass. If something breaks, the grace period leaves a margin to renew, usually at the normal price at first and a higher one later.

One account in the business's name

The domains that stay belong in a single registrar account owned by the business, not by an employee, a designer or an owner personally.

Send renewal notices to a mailbox that does not live on the domain being renewed, and that more than one person reads. A notice sent to a mailbox on an expired domain reaches nobody.

Renew the keepers for several years at a time, on a card the bookkeeper knows about.

The counter-case

Some unused domains earn their renewal. A business launching a second brand next year, or one whose name is easily confused with a competitor's, may reasonably hold a few more than it uses.

And the money saved is small. The real value is knowing what you own, where it is, and that nothing important depends on a name you forgot.

Keep what was ever public, and let the rest go on purpose rather than by accident.

This afternoon

1. Search old inboxes for registrar renewal emails.
2. Check card statements for domain charges.
3. List every domain with its expiry date.
4. Mark any ever printed or used for email.
5. Keep the main name and its close variations.
6. Move accounts off addresses on dropped domains.
7. Switch off renewal for the rest, deliberately.

Step six prevents real harm. A lapsed domain someone else registers can receive your password resets, and the account behind them may matter more than the domain ever did.

A domain you keep also carries records worth knowing about, such as the one covered in CAA records and who may issue your certificate.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.