How to track your inactive domains

I have a confession to make: I’m addicted to purchasing domain names. Whenever I get an idea for a project, I can’t stop thinking about how to name it and when I find a good enough name, I have to purchase the domain for it. The result? About a dozen of domains doing nothing. I could just release them, but I feel like some of those can actually be worth something to someone (they do to me) and I have not necessarily given up on creating something with them.

So instead of letting them sit on an ad page for GoDaddy that gives me absolutely no benefit, I created a simple “domains for sale” website (hosted on a subdomain on one of my existing domains, I’m crazy enough to buy another domain for that) and I forward each of them there (the subdomain in question is domainsforsale.mbillard.com). I created the website with Ruby on Rails, because I could create something simple quickly and because I could make use of the excellent heroku hosting which is free for websites with low performance requirements.

By simple, I mean simple

What really makes this work though is that each of the domains forward to this page with the name of the domain as a parameter (ex: …domainsforsale.mbillard.com/?domain=[domain name]). Combined with a Google Analytics profile, I can now track which domains are accessed and how often they are. This helps me know more about which domains might actually be worth something. Clearly stating that a domain is for sale also helps users looking to purchase one of those domains because the contact information is right there, users don’t have to go search in a whois databases.

If you have inactive domains that you would be willing to sell, there’s no reason not to do this.

Note: There’s also an administration section not shown here that I use for managing the domains (in case I sell or buy one).