domain

“Israel.com” domain name was sold for $5.88 million. The identity of the buyer is still not revealed.

In May, 2008, Moniker, a internet domain registrar announced in their website that they would be auctioning the domain “Israel.com” for a price of $5.5 million. Many felt that the price is unrealistic and would not turn out to be a postivite bid. The auction website www.auctioninfo.org carried out the process. Surprisingly, the domain auction ended within six days on May 23rd.

Currently, the domain still does not contain a website and just contains PPC advertisements redirecting users to tourism, history and travel websites. It would be interesting to note the content of the site when launched.

Joel Noel Friedman, aJewish American was the previous owner of the domain, “Israel.com”. Speaking to www.auctioninfo.org, Friedman mentioned that he didn’t expect the domain to be valuded so high when be bought it in 1994.

The 46 year old further mentioned that he had originally registered the domain name in his name fearing that the domain might be misused by someone else. He had auctioned the domain name as a tribute to the Israel’s 60th anniversary.

Buying domain names with popular names is common and is considered as an investment as the domain is usually sold for a higher rate. Some resort to buying common mistyped company names or resemble any popular company to make some quick traffic. To overcome this, major companies buy all related domain names. The cost of common .com domain names are around $10 while popular keyword domains are sold in thousands.

The new SmartSpace from GoDaddy can help even an internet dummy to create a site at ease which has photo galleries, email addresses, chat rooms and a blog. That’s what SmartSpace claims in its caption, “Be live on the web immediately with an instantly connected domain!”

SmartSpace offers a free blog tool, a free photo site and free social space once you order a domain name with SmartSpace at Godaddy. Social space is an application by Smart Space which can be used to collect and display dynamic information from Flicker, YouTube, Google News and Facebook profiles.

The tool has a clean and simple interface as it caters to users who are not technically sound. The tool guides the user step by step based on the features requested. The only requirement needed from the user would be to choose the layouts, color preferences and customize it. That’s not a big requirement and hey it’s your website and you need to decide them.

The SmartSpace feature can be accessed by logging in using your regular username and password. With many new domain sellers and hosting providers arraying into the market, hosting providers have to provide additional features with little or no cost to hold on to their existing customers.

Manashosting, an India based Web Hosting Company who provides cheap hosting and domain registrations have had some awful reviews & feedbacks. As the client base increased, Manashosting reduced its customer importance. Two to three week delay in response to a mail or literally no response is what you get when you write to Manashosting. Read the full story

Google has planned to stop revenues from Adsense if the domain is less than five days old. This policy if implemented would be a disaster to websites who earn millions of dollars using the AGP or the Add Grace Period method. This is expected to be implemented before the month of March.

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