The dangers of dead domains

There’s an enormous market for expired domains. But, as Barry Collins discovers, it’s not without risks

Peter Askew literally doesn’t know his onions. But ten years ago, he bid $2,200 in an auction for the expired domain VidaliaOnions.com, with no clear idea of what to do with it, or even what Vidalia onions were. In the months that followed, he made contact with Vidalia onion farmers, developed a website from which they could sell their produce directly to consumers, and built a successful online business that’s still thriving today, spurred by nothing more than a weird domain name that caught his attention at auction. (You can read his amazing full story at tinyurl.com/360onions). Askew’s story is a moonshot, a one-in-a-million example of pure entrepreneurship. But buying expired domains – URLs that for one reason or another appear to have been abandoned by their original owner – is…

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PC Pro (Digital) - 1 Issue, September 2024

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