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There are still many thousands of three-letter domains for (third-party) sale on .com/net/org though. Sedo.com lists a handful of .net domains that are under $100. Most are more than that though.
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> for (third-party) sale

Many of us find it unethical to give money to scalpers.

> a handful of .net domains that are under $100

And this is why.

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Yeah... my .com renewal lapsed due to an expired credit card, and it was snatched before I realized it. They've always wanted $2k for it.

Even if I was OK paying in principle, that's too much for a personal blog that gets one post every 4 years.

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I had a domain that I was just using for e-mail, just to catch everything and not link directly to me. Then lent the A record to host an archive of something, which got linked around a load of places. So had "SEO Value" suddenly.

Did the same, the renewal failed because the card had expired, and now squatters have been sat on it, probably getting all my spam and resetting my credentials on random websites for the last 10 years.

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Lesson for everyone else reading this is to not let your domains lapese. You can also pay ahead (up to 10 years for most registries) so there really is no excuse - and that tends to provide some protection from price hikes as well, or at least give you more time to react.
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can't say .expert that its popular by any measure but I have https://use.expert

In my opinion, there are still some really great short domains available. I actually even know some but don't have the budget to buy them.

The thing with domains is also that they aren't one time, I mean I am happy paying for domains which are 20$ say once even (and this comes as someone frugal but I just love domains) but most of these domains cost quite a lot.

For example use.expert would cost me around 40-50$ per year. I mean its 3-4$ per month so I am happy with it but still, my point is that I absolutely know more domains which I wish to buy but it would just be an hassle long term. I can probably sell them at cheap auctions to recoup the price but it just doesn't feel that worth it to me but overall, yeah.

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.expert is a "new" TLD meaning that the operator can do more or less whatever they want and is not bound to the same ICANN rules as the gTLD operator(s) are. IMO nuTLDs are not appropriate for anything except joke sites.

> For example use.expert would cost me around 40-50$ per year. I mean its 3-4$ per month so I am happy with it but still, my point is that I absolutely know more domains which I wish to buy but it would just be an hassle long term. I can probably sell them at cheap auctions to recoup the price but it just doesn't feel that worth it to me but overall, yeah.

Well yes, that's exactly why we unfortunately need to pay rent for domains - otherwise speculators would just buy them all up even more than they already do.

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