Domain Host Shuffle

Click to check out my little eBay store.

In addition to keeping up this silly blog I run a small eBay store. It's more of an entrepreneurial hobby selling some small hardware pieces and seeing what I can make out of it. So far it has been going well. Requiring a minimal amount of time to make a little extra money. There is the hoop dream of it growing beyond where I can solo manage it and either doing some hiring or finding a buyer. I met all of my last year's sales goals and now it's time to re-evaluate and figure out how to grow some more.

Part of the business building was  registering and keeping its domain name: tipsnbits.com. I did the initial registering through Wordpress.com and figured I could have a blog and eventually the store would grow enough to where I could move away from the eBay platform and run it on my own. I grabbed the domain as soon as the name occurred to me as it captures what I want to sell.

Domain registration is cheap and I set about building a site that had its own content, but had all ways pointing to the eBay store. I figured it would be just as easy to keep up as this place. The trouble became having the time and energy to do the "fun" blogging here and the marketing-oriented blogging relating to the eBay site. There are only so many times I can say how awesome the products in my little store are before I want to render myself unconscious.

Thus, I made a move to simplify things. I decided to drop the blog experience of tipsnbits.com and just forward the domain to the eBay store. I could then work on growing the brand through finding products my shoppers find value in and still have the domain for setting up Google Ads, etc.

I quickly found that domain forwarding through Wordpress.com is a $12/year service. That's a bit of a rip-off in my mind. Especially since I know you can do that with a domain obtained from domains.google.com for free (after you buy the domain, of course). I actually found that you can transfer domains to Google, or elsewhere quite easily. All I needed was to start the transfer on the Wordpress.com end by getting a transfer authorization number in moments by email. I then went to domains.google.com and set up the transfer by entering the domain name and authorization number.

Setting up the forwarding was very easy too. Instead of having to deal with esoteric instructions of changing "cname" and making sure the DNS server is right, Google just asked me where I'd like my tipsnbits.com domain name to forward to and I was done. Within an hour I was up and running.