When I was in college I decided to build a personal/portfolio website. My online name had always been vertseven. A combination of my graffiti tag “vert” and my favorite number “7”. Nothing too fancy. When it came to buying a domain name, I initially wanted vert.com. But somebody had it. So vertseven.com was an easy second. This was in 1996. Vertseven became my whole identity online.
Jump forward to 2018. The website hosting company that I had been using since 2003 crashed while transfering my websites to a new server and all of my records were deleted. Not a big deal for my sites as I had them all backed up. However, the email address that I was using to manage my domain names was deleted. I forgot to reset it. Then, one day, I wasn’t receiving any email at vertseven.com. Servers were fine, but my main website wasn’t loading. I went to check the DNS and saw that the domain had expired.
Turns out that since I wasn’t receiving email from the DNS, I didn’t know that it had been blocked. I called the DNS and they told me that the domain would be available for purchased in a few months. I waited until midnight of the day that it was available and went to re-buy my domain.
Well that didn’t happen. A company from China purchased it before me. I paid for a broker to get my domain back and he failed miserably. What was my identity online for 22 years was gone.
After a lot of anger and rage, I decided to buy vertseven.art and start over.
Vertseven.art is now my art and photography portfolio and online store. You should really check it out. 😉
A few months ago I was playing a round of disc golf and, as I walking up to the 8th tee at Wickham Park, I received a phone call. I picked it up and some guy was offering to sell me vertseven.com. I told him that I’m a broke artist and can’t afford the price that the company was offering. He said that he’s with NetSol. I said, “wait the domain is available?” He said, “yes.” I went to DirectNic and bought back my domain for $9. I felt like a lizard whose tail just grew back.