Back in 1993, I took the radical (at the time) step of requesting a new domain, strom.com. I say request because back then there wasn’t any actual “purchase” – the internet was still relatively new to the general public, and all it took to become master of your domain was a simple email request, which was satisfied within minutes. Let us pause to remember and honor these simpler times.

As you well know, over the 32 years I have used that domain for my own promotion and business. But the time has come for me to sell the domain. And for those of you that are thinking about doing this, I am writing an article about the experience for the Internet Protocol Journal. I found that it wasn’t a simple or straightforward process, and my goal with this article is to help you think it through before you finalize your own domain sale. To help with my reporting, if you have sold or bought a domain name and want to share your own lessons learned, I would love to hear from you.

BTW, my new email is david@webinformant.com. Please change your address books now.

This isn’t the first time I sold my digital assets. In 2020 for IPJ, I wrote about selling an unused IPv4 address block. The process for selling a domain is both more complex and also depends on your particular situation, which I will get into in my article. I was lucky enough to have a short last name, to only use it for my domain, and for having chosen a dot com, which is still the most marketable suffix. For years I regretted that I didn’t own davidstrom.com – that would have been a better choice for my brand, but not as fungible as just my last name. Why? It turns out “strom” is used in a variety of non-English languages and a variety of businesses. One advantage to owning my own name is that I got to come across many other namesakes whom I have e-met or met f2f over the years, along with composing a column with one of them who is a conservative blogger.

I began this transition last year, when I was contacted by a domain broker that I have known for many years. Before I could even begin to contemplate selling, I first had to take stock of my entire digital footprint. That first step was to examine my password manager, which had more than 500 login accounts, many of which used my strom.com credentials as their username. Weeding through that collection was very time consuming and tedious. It would have helped things if before I started the weeding, I had picked what my new email address was going to be. Well, nobody is perfect. I am sure some smarter person would just program something in Python or some AI tool, but I did it the old fashioned manual way of logging into a site, finding where I had to change my user name, and then coping with the flurry of emails confirming that this change was anticipated and not some North Korean hacker that was attempting to use my identity for ill-gotten gains. The good news is that I was able to eliminate more than 150 unused logins.

This part of the migration showed me (and by extension, now you) how brittle our email infrastructure is. I know: tell me something that we don’t know. Some of the login changes required confirmations from both the old and new email address. Some of the logins used a non-email username but hide the email address used to send notifications somewhere in their settings screens. Of course my initial pass through my password vault I forgot about those. For example, with one account (my cell provider), I needed to call them to change my email address. On the phone.

Email addresses also lurk in various dark corners of your digital infrastructure for less obvious notifications. For example, LinkedIn has primary and secondary email addresses, and I forgot to change the latter one, and as I was writing this also remembered that I also had to change the link to my new website.

I am glad now that I took the time and effort to go through all of this. One interesting fact: unlike moving my house, moving my website required no actual transportation of the bits themselves. Thanks to how my hosting provider Pair.com originally designed things, the move was accomplished with a few phone calls and simple commands to link the old website to the new domain. To some of you, that seems obvious, and you are probably smirking as you read this. But to me it was a revelation, and I am thankful that the Pair support folks had the patience to walk me through things.

So moving forward, strom.com will soon be something else and someone else’s property entirely. Part of me is somewhat sad, as I have had that domain for so long, along with a trademark for the webinformant name that I also got back then. (These email newsletters began a year earlier, in 1995.) That reminds me about a story that I can tell you about that name. When I got my mark, I had no idea that it would become a point of contention with a publishing firm that had already begun a series of other “informants.” They contested my mark, claiming that it interfered with their own. I forget the exact legal back-and-forth that I had to go through, but eventually it was a moot point: the company moved on from publishing, as far as I can tell.