Well, I finally got round to writing another post. Over the last week or so I had another push to sort out my online presence and get a website hosted where I want it. This post is about the former, I will cover the website later.
I registered ankersfamily.org more than 10 years ago, when we lived in Singapore. I wanted a domain so that we could have email addresses that were not dependent upon our ISP so that we could keep them when we moved again. This strategy worked well, we moved country and also changed ISP in The Netherlands without having to give anyone a new email address.
When I registered ankersfamily.org I really wanted ankers.com but that already belonged to a car repair business in the US and ankers.org and ankers.net had gone too. I should have picked up davidankers.com then but I was being frugal. Of course, it is now gone (to a chap in Australia who isn’t using it much but doesn’t want to sell). It is not a bad mistake but now that I want to set up my own site, in case I end up free-lancing, it is not ideal.
Recently I did a proper scan on available permutations of david or dave and ankers with various TLDs (the bit at the end of a web address) including .net, .org, .me and their UK and EU equivalents. I wanted to pick a main domain and then possible mis-spellings and alternatives to maximise the chance of someone finding my site.
I settled on david-ankers.com but also registered the .net, .org, .co.uk and .eu equivalents. Plus daveankers.com and dave-ankers.com, davidankers.co.uk, .eu and .me.uk and finally ankers.eu. That is 11 domains for me and another for the family. It adds up to around £100 per year in fees but that should be deductible.
I am still trying to get the other desirable names, but don’t hold out much hope.