I bought 2 domains today, dhruvgo.re and drgo.re.

They both link to my personal website:

Thought I’d quickly explain how domains work, and how I obtained them.

  1. Every single website has a specific address called an IP address. If you typed in 142.250.190.46 into your address bar, it would take you to Google.com.

    type ping [URL] into any terminal to find the IP address for a domain

  2. Similarly to memorising phone numbers, it’d be impossible to memorise IP addresses for all the websites we care about. Domains are basically human readable names that resolve to IP addresses, that way you can type in google.com instead of 142.250.190.46 into your address bar.

  3. Computers actually read addresses backwards, e.g. google.com is read as .com first and then google second. The second part (the .com) is called a ‘top-level domain’ or TLD. This basically just helps categorise the domain and organise the internet to make it easier for us to navigate.

.com (commercial) domains are the most popular, others that are more niche are .blog, .basketball, etc. There are TLDs for different countries, like .us, .au, .uk etc.

Fun fact, the island Tuvalu gets 8-10% ($5-6.5M USD) of its government revenue from its .tv TLD. For example, twitch.tv

My last name is Gore, and luckily a .re TLD exists. It comes from Réunion, a French Island near Madagascar.

I bought the dhruvgo.re and drgo.re domains, and used INWX to buy them. Country TLDs usually only allow citizens of the country and certain other allies to buy them, in the case of Réunion you have to either reside in a member state of the EU or Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, or Switzerland.

To get around this, many domain sites offer a trustee service where the provider registers a legal office in the country and is listed as the owner.

I went with INWX because they provided the lowest trustee service fee, at only 3€ per year. Overall the 2 domains altogether cost me ~$50 AUD per year!

That’s about it, let me know if you guys had any questions! Don’t forget to like and subscribe if you enjoyed :)))