Revised Plans
You'll most likely want to skip this blog entry. It hold no value. Really. None. Its simply a rant to make myself feel better. It will be full of typos. It my blog after all, I get to do those things.
I've had a really exciting business venture in the works for quite a few months now. I've been able to secure a development team, the planning phase is pretty much complete and we've been all but ready to break ground on the initial code within the next 2 weeks.
As with any project on the web, one of they key aspects is the domain. This project in particular requires something extremely short & simple ... which of course is a major challenge. After countless brainstorming sessions I finally enlisted the help of my wife and way too many online word generator tools and she ended up discovering something that was nothing short of perfect. I thought it over for a few days and every time it passed my mind I became more and more attached to it. I was convinced I had struck gold and couldn't wait to secure it. Much more than a domain, it was genius branding for the entire project. It captured everything that it needed to. It really couldn't have been more perfect.
The only problem, which I thought would be minor in the beginning, was that it happened to be an international domain. I studied the rules and did as much research as I could just to make sure I was okay to purchase it. I even enlisted the help of a friend in Europe to add as a contact on the domain just in case. Everything was in place and set up .. there should have been no issue.
The registration process turned out to be ridiculous. I tried 12 registrars and the first eleven all failed for various reasons. The mass majority of them all had broken websites. This amazed me. Another part of them all had invalid security certificates ... a definite no-go from me. And then a random few had payment processing problems, most likely getting denied by my bank because of the international nature of the transaction. With these final few, I did everything I could, including using different banks, different accounts and calling my bank to pre-authorize the transaction. Still nothing.
Finally, in the middle of May I had some luck and found a registrar that appeared to work. My credit card went through, and although they were nearly 5x what other's were charging, I didn't care at this point. I just needed to secure it and worry about the details later. I expected the process to be similar to purchasing a domain here in the US, that is, 5 minutes after you purchase it the domain is available to you. But apparently that's not the way it works over seas. After 3 days of a "pending" status I finally gave them a call and was informed that the process sometimes takes awhile.
I then proceeded to call them twice a week checking on the order of my status. Every time I was fed a line about how the country's official registrar had received the application and sent the approval notice but they still needed to submit some final notes blah blah blah blah. I stayed patient, continued my phone calls and prayed. More than a month later, when checking around to dig deeper into what was going on, I noticed one registrar was showing the domain as unavailable. I figured this was great news as it meant the country's official registrar had finally informed its resellers that the domain was purchased and unavailable. I then checked the whois information on the domain and imagine my surprise when it wasn't me! And even more surprised was that the registration had been created only 3 days prior. The domain is now squatted by a generic ad site.
I called the registrar I dealt with in London as soon as they opened and all that I was given was "sorry" and "we'll promptly refund your money".
Really?
Needless to say, over the last month I've spent countless hours on the marketing & graphics material for it. The branding took me forever to finalize and once I had it nailed, it was perfect. I couldn't wait to get it out there into the wild ... and now ... all for nothing.
Of course my initial reaction was extreme anger. It took everything in me not to scream at the registrar customer salesman ... and I suppose the only reason I didn't was the knowledge that it wouldn't do any good yelling at someone thousands of miles away on another continent who really doesn't give a shit about my situation or experience. All I could do was finish the conversation, hang up, and sit there bewildered about the situation. Its a bit comical I suppose how frustrating it can get when things don't go as planned, and how that frustration is multiplied when so much planning has gone in to it.
The anger calms, exhaustion sets in, life goes on ... and ...
Hello square one, nice to see you again.