I think if I remember correctly it has been two weeks since I first purchased my domain name, or has it been three? I am honestly not exactly sure because I am sleep deprived after working on this website for the last 5 weeks. "Yes, the math doesn't quite add up!" :-)
Now this is a story in itself. I purchased karinwinter.com for the first time over fifteen years ago for the price of $20. Awesome! I created a little free Weebly website and things were great, for years and years. Until 2011 when you all know, if you have read previous posts, my daughter was born and everything I had been doing, I stopped doing. So sadly I forgot to update my current credit card information to my domain host and my domain expired. "No big deal", I thought, "Who else could possibly want this domain name?" I went back on my domain host website a few weeks later and you guessed it, my domain name of karinwinter.com was gone. Just gone. We tried to look and see who had purchased it, but the best they were able to tell me was "Someone in China." At this time I even paid some intervention company $100 to approach the new owner to release the domain name back to me, to no avail. Well that's unfortunate but I let it go, I created another site karinwinter.photography. However, as my best friend recently told me: "Everyones knows that when you end a website in .org, .net or .photography it is only because .com is already taken and you are pretty much a looser :-)" Her words not mine! Regardless my website was fine for a bit until I completely let it go and didn't look at it for years. Until 2 years ago when I got an inkling to type in my name again and see if it had opened up. I searched my karinwinter.com and yes it was available! Great! I was pretty excited, because that is really the name that I wanted for my site. I kept clicking through some prompts until the cart showed up: KA-CHING: $6000. It was for sale for the astronomical price of six thousand dollars! Well "No way Jose!", I said and left the whole thing alone again.
Fast forward to last week. I have been playing around with the idea of opening up a website again. I am steadily busy as a photographer and am now adding my yoga teachings to my services so I figured it would be a good idea to have a website again, a place to direct potential clients and students. This time I knew, as I am offering so many different directions: Yoga, Photography and Art not many names would work. I wanted my site to encompass all my passions. So here I go, I type my desired name in again, fingers crossed and it is for sale still. This time the price had dropped to $600. "Ok not bad", I thought, but still too expensive.
So per my husbands advice I called the owner of the domain, funnily enough a company right down the road in Denver. I pleated with them, "Can we lower this price?" I am just a little ol' housewife with five kids, I am nobody famous, there is no way I can afford $600 right now. They held firm and would not lower the price, they didn't even care like a tiny bit, a resounding "No." What he could do however was offer me a payment plan, no fees, no interest, for the next year I would be paying $50 a month. I will not have complete ownership of the domain but I can use it and point it towards any web host I choose to build my site at. After my year is up, the domain will be mine once again! Now if only I can remember to renew it on time! ;-)