I was unfortunate enough today to be at the receiving end of a vicious verbal attack for registering a Top Level Domain (TLD) name.

"How dare you", I think was one of the comments made.

This vitriolic tirade came over the telephone line from someone that I had classed as a "friend". Certainly, if friendship is involved, this person has made very little effort to understand anything about me. Because I had spent considerable time and effort, as well as a financial cost with the aim of providing this person, her husband, and their business, with a tool which I thought may have been useful for them. But, I shall come back to this point later.

This scenario highlights the importance for anyone in business to not only have a web site, but to register multiple domains.

Food is one of my passions in life, so lets take it as an example. I am an Aussie, and the meat pie is about as Australian as a pavlova or a lamington. Lets also suppose that your name is Joe, and you have sent up a business making and distributing meat pies. You have done a search and have found that the name "JoesPies" is available to you. You are an Aussie with an Australian business, so you are entitled to add the extension ".com.au" after the "JoesPies" part.

You have your web site designed and published, and over a period of time you are getting increased traffic to your web site resulting in sales of Joe's Pies. Life is good!
However, some time down the track there happens to be another Joe who wants a web site or sites. Or, it may even be a Fred or a Mary. They do a search and find that "JoesPies" with each of the extensions .com, .net, .name, . biz, .info, are available. A dilemma for Joe, Fred or Mary is which one to choose? Well, my advise for what it is worth would be to register the lot. It is exactly the same advise I would have given the first Joe if he had asked me to protect his business. The cost of registering them all, (with a competitively priced Registrant), is less than a hundred dollars for a couple of years protection.
I would strongly suggest that you do exactly the same, regardless of the type of business in which you are involved. Because you have registered one domain name only, it does not give you proprietary rights over all of the other extensions. You may not want six or more web sites, perhaps you want one only. That's OK, you can park the others free of charge with reputable Domain name registrants, or even better still you could arrange to have

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