June 1, 2000

What's In a Name? Maybe Millions

By Paul Berton | The London Free Press

Kevin Ham is about to finish up as chief resident at St. Joseph's Family Medical Centre in London, but he expects he won't be needing the income he'll be paid as a doctor.

About 18 months ago, in his spare time, he started an Internet company called Hostglobal.com and he hopes to be a millionaire sometime this year.

"I'm going to practise medicine for fun," he says.

Hostglobal, an Internet Web-hosting directory, is basically a yellow pages for Web site companies. It generates income from advertising.

But that's just the beginning.

Since launching Hostglobal from his desktop in the Colborne Street apartment he shares with his wife and young daughter, Ham has branched out.

He now runs DNSindex.com, an Internet domain name resource index. People can get information about domain names and register domain names there for as little as $13.

"The domain name business is huge," he says.

To give you an idea of just how big, consider that the name business.com sold late last year for $7.5 million US.

The seller bought it three years ago from a British Internet service provider for $150,000 US -- a price considered outrageous at the time.

The Internet domain name www.themortgage.com recently sold in Canada for $500,000.

Since deregulation, the cost of registering a domain name has dropped from about $70 a name to as low as $10 in some cases. Naturally, the number of registered names is multiplying like rabbits across North America.

For example, it took four years for the first 10 million domain names to be registered by the end of 1999, but seven million more have been registered since.

Most of the good dot-com names are gone, says Ham, who owns a coveted three-letter dot-com name -- zej.com -- which he bought for $70 recently.

It's inadvisable to try registering a trademark name, he says, because you can be sued and have it taken away. So most of us are stuck with generic names such as business.com or frenchfries.com, most of which have been registered, or our own names.

Just because all the names are registered doesn't mean they aren't available, says Ham.

That's where DNSindex.com comes in. For $50 a year, Ham provides lists of domain names whose registration has run out after two years and haven't been renewed. Of the 17 million names registered, only a quarter are active.

DNSindex.com posts about 500 expired names each week, and allows people to register the names on behalf of a registrar in the U.S.

Because Ham does so much volume, "they fight over my business," he says.

Sooner or later, you'd think, the domain name business will fizzle. But Ham thinks otherwise.

Dot-com names are hot now, but there are a few dot-org suffixes getting some interest. Dot-net might be next. As well, there are other suffixes likely to be added as the Internet grows, such as dot-shop or dot-banc, Ham says.

As for Ham, who will soon move to Vancouver and fill in for vacationing family doctors, his only concern is spending too much time in front of a computer screen.

"I don't want to spend all of my time on the Internet. I want to spend time with my family and I want to practise medicine."