Sometimes running a business is wonderfully simple.
You buy something.
You pay for it.
You receive it.
At least that is the theory.
Recently, I decided to create a separate phone setup for my domain business. The idea was simple: one professional number, one dedicated device, and a clear separation between personal life and conversations with clients, registrars and business partners.
Nothing revolutionary.
I was not trying to launch a telecom company.
I just wanted a phone.
A Loyal Customer Meets the Algorithm
My family had already been using the same telecom provider for years, with multiple services and subscriptions.
So I assumed ordering another mobile line would be relatively painless.
That was optimistic.
First, I tried to connect the new subscription to an existing family arrangement.
No.
Apparently there were limits.
Fair enough.
I decided to forget the discount and simply pay the normal price.
Surely paying full price would simplify things.
That was optimistic too.
The payment went through.
The website produced an error.
Support suggested trying again.
So I tried again.
Another payment authorization appeared.
And somewhere inside a telecom company’s computer system, I apparently transformed from a long-term customer into a mysterious international fugitive trying to obtain a smartphone.
The Ultimate Security Technology: Paper
Then came the masterpiece.
After years as a customer and after providing the usual documents, I was asked to send a paper cheque as an additional guarantee.
A cheque.
By post.
For an online purchase.
In the age of 5G.
I had almost everything necessary to run a modern digital business: online banking, electronic invoices, cloud storage, domain APIs, two-factor authentication and instant payments.
What I did not have was a cheque book.
So I had to order one.
There is something beautifully ironic about buying a modern smartphone for an internet business and discovering that the missing technology is apparently a piece of paper invented centuries ago.
Domain Investors Should Recognise This Feeling
Domain investors experience the same contradiction surprisingly often.
The product we trade is completely digital.
A domain can theoretically move from one owner to another in seconds.
Yet the actual process may involve:
- authorization codes;
- account verification;
- registry rules;
- registrar locks;
- identity checks;
- emails that never arrive;
- contacts that refuse to update;
- mysterious waiting periods;
- support tickets explaining why the button that should work does not work.
You can own a domain used by servers on three continents, protected by modern cryptography, while waiting for someone in an office to manually approve a field in a database.
Technology moves fast.
Procedures sometimes travel by horse.
The Cheapest Option Is Not Always the Cheapest
There was another familiar lesson.
At first I wanted to use an available discount.
That created one problem.
Giving up the discount created another.
Trying to solve that problem created another procedure.
And eventually I was spending something much more valuable than the discount:
time.
Domain investors make exactly the same mistake.
We may transfer 100 domains to save €1 per renewal.
Excellent.
Then we discover that bulk tools are poor, contacts need to be corrected manually, nameservers did not migrate correctly and support requires twelve messages to understand what happened.
Congratulations.
We saved €100.
We only spent two working days doing it.
The real cost of a registrar, hosting company, marketplace or telecom provider is not just the number printed on the invoice.
It is:
price + time + risk + frustration.
Unfortunately, frustration is rarely shown in the pricing table.
Loyalty Exists Mostly in Marketing
Perhaps the most interesting lesson was about loyalty.
Customers often think:
I have been with this company for years. Surely their system knows me.
The system may know you.
The procedure may not care.
Domain investors should remember this too.
Keeping hundreds of domains with one registrar for ten years does not guarantee that your next unusual support request will be easy.
A marketplace where you sold domains yesterday may request additional verification tomorrow.
A registry rule can change.
An account can trigger an automated review.
Business relationships matter, but they should never replace good records, backups and alternative options.
Your infrastructure should survive the sentence:
“Sorry, our system does not allow that.”
I try to understand…
My business phone adventure did eventually teach me something useful.
When building infrastructure for a domain business, I now value four things more than before:
simplicity, documentation, redundancy and human support.
A slightly more expensive service that works reliably can be cheaper than the cheapest service that requires constant intervention.
A registrar with competent support can be worth more than a €1 renewal discount.
And a procedure that looks ridiculous may still have to be completed if you want the final result.
Sometimes business is not about finding the perfect system.
It is about surviving the existing one with your sense of humour intact.
I started this journey because I wanted a separate phone for talking to clients.
Instead, I received a small course in risk management, customer service and bureaucracy.
The phone was almost a bonus.
“The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.”
— Benjamin Franklin (commonly attributed)
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