If you are not into investing in domains, you should definitely check it out right now because, like the real estate market, it’s a buyer’s market.

Here is an interesting LLLL.com for sale, QBAY.COM, cousin to EBAY.COM (j/k :))

It’s listed on, you’ve guessed it, ebay!

QBAY.COM auction link

I’m one of the bidders in the auction, and so far the highest bid is $7008.88, which hasn’t met the reserve.

I’m thinking of developing a site on it that compliments eBay.com, perhaps a site with list of the most bizarre auctions, a list high-ticket items, a list of items with most bids (most active auction), etc.

Once you get that site/script developed, you can then flip it to another domain/website investor or end-user.

What would you use the domain for if you were to own QBAY.COM, and how much would you buy that domain for?

I woke up early this morning @ 6:30am (OK, some of you probably think it’s late) to watch a 4-letter domain being auctioned off on eBay. The domain is boso.com and you can see how much it got sold for here.

Yeah, I came in a close 2nd high bid of $4,250. I thought for sure I got it with only a few seconds left, but another domain investor snatched it right out of my hands for $5,100.

So, what’s boso.com all about and what makes that domain so valuable?

If you are into domain investing, you will know that 4-letter .com’s are in high demand, especially premium 4-letter .com’s that are pronounceable or brandable.

I remember just 2 years ago I had a list of over 14,000 4-letter .com’s that are still available to register, but today they are all taken.

Take, for example, parse.com that is being auctioned off right now. I put a bid of $10,000 and that’s not even meeting the seller’s reserve.

So, what makes parse.com so valuable (I think it will go well into 5-figures)? Well, it’s both a dictionary word and brandable like the seller said.

In my opinion and from past experience, eBay isn’t the best place to sell a premium website or domain. It is, however, a great place to pick up deals.

So, knowing that, you should also look into purchasing some 4-letter .com’s from eBay and flip them in a domain forum (dnforum.com is a good one) or webmaster/IM forums such as sitepoint.com/marketplace, or you can just buy and hold and wait for the value of your domain to skyrocket.

I frequent sitepoint’s marketplace (http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace) to look for good “deals” to buy. Recently I came across someone selling a PR4 domain here.

At the time of this writing the bid on that domain is $40, and you have to think that this is really too good to be true. So I went to my favorite PR checker tool here and it came back saying that it may be a fake PR.

Well, it probably is. Whoever owned the domain did a 301 redirect to http://blogoforum.com/ for a while just long enough for Google to give it the same PR as blogoforum.com, and then takes off the 301 redirect and parked it.

I raised this concern in the sales thread and got my comment deleted.

So the moral of the story is, if the deal seems too good to be true, it probably is (not all the time), and you should do your due diligence to make sure you get what you paid for.

I’m sure some of you had noticed that my site was down (account suspended) for 2 days a couple of days ago.

Well, as it turned out, I don’t think Hostgator wants to host my sites anymore. I purchased their Reseller plan and have over 100 sites on that that plan. I do have some active sites, but most of them are just parked domains.

Out of the blue they suspended NetPassiveIncome.com because it’s causing a CPU overload and it’s affecting other sites on the same server.

I wrote back to Hostgator asking what the reason for the overload is and they wrote back telling me that it’s due to high traffic. Now, I know for sure I have other sites that get much more traffic than my blog on the same account, and if it’s an attack then they should know what to do. I checked my web stats and saw no unusual amount of traffic, so I don’t know what the issue is other than that they wanted me off their shared server and on my own dedicated.

Fine, no problem, if that’s how they want to play it. I asked if they can enable cPanel so I can go in and create a backup copy of my site so I can move it to my dedicated. Support email came back and offered to zip it up for me. I had to write back and say “please do so” - another few hours of downtime wasted.

In any case, this is actually not the first time that Hostgator suspended my account. Last time they suspended my account I had actually called their security department and talked with a network security engineer who couldn’t tell me why my account was suspended the first place.

Anyway, rant’s over, now this blog is hosted on a LiquidWeb server - not the cheapest, but one of the best web hosts in the industry. Oh… also, stay away from Hostmonster - they may just terminate your account out of the blue as well.

If you are looking for shared hosting, site5.com is actually pretty impressive.