How i.in led to chupchap.in

I had promised here to narrate the long story behind this domain I bought and how I set it up. It all started with me being confused about what kind of domain I wanted to buy. Should it be chupchap.com, chupchap.in a shorter domain like chup.in or something even shorter. I just wasn’t sure; just indecisive. Yet another problem with young people these days I suppose. 😀

So what do most people do when they want a domain? Head to who.is to check if the domain they want is available and that’s what I did. I searched chupchap.com and chupchap.in, and to my pleasure, found that both of them were available. So what now? Should I go ahead and register them or waste more time searching for shorter, but not necessarily better domain? I decided to waste some more time.

So I thought if I wanted a magical domain name what would it be? The first domain name that came to my head was i.in. After all this blog is all about me; I hardly write about anyone else no?

So I searched and to my surprise (very very surprised) I found that it was still available. Oh My God, the shortest domain possible, a premium one and it’s available! So I headed straight to eWebguru, where my gaming blog is hosted. I booked it in three easy steps at around Rs1,600, which is a standard rate at the host.

I was rejoiced, after all I have a premium domain, I could start a impossible-to-make-profit-off URL shortening service, an email service or sell it off at a higher price. I was overjoyed. So overjoyed that I decided to share it with my followers at twitter. After a round of congratulatory tweets, someone pointed it out to me. It is impossible for me to own such a domain. Turns out, all one-character and two-character domains, are reserved by government and NIXI order, and are not available to the public. For example I could buy abc.in but not a.in or ab.in 🙁

I was heart broken. After filing for a support ticket, which was answered in fifteen minutes, I was given an option to opt for any other .in domain. This time, I did not try to experiment. I opted for chupchap.in and by next day my domain was active. But every day when I visit my blog (to find that 25 people landed up on my blog and they came via image search aaargh!)I wish it was i.in and imagine having a four/five/six figure bank dollars (in dollars I mean).

If you are interested in setting up your blog/website, you can try out eWebguru where my blog is hosted. You will get a good deal if you follow this link. This link is part of their referral program which I have signed up for, but this post is in no way sponsored by them.