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discuss Cost of creating your own landing page

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Here is an idea
(not an original one).

I create a "one page" site.

People visit a domain, that domain is redirected to that site,
that page has the same content whatever the domain, except,
that domain name appears on the landing page and in the title, or maybe also in the url.
(better if I can customize further.)
No problem with resolving, and safe against ddos etc.

People can send me a message via email (form-mail)
(better also if I can also reply using the site)
they would provide their contact info, and I would also get their IP.
A chat option can be a bonus (online or offline).

Any such service? There must be lots of free services somewhere.
I prefer services which don't invest in domains.
No FB or linked in, or twitter.
No service requiring id, phone call, installing app etc.

(Here by cost, I don't mean money (only).
I mean, time, protection, avoiding headache,
looks, usefulness,..)
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
Does anyone think Wordpress is good or bad for this purpose. Maybe create a page in 10 minutes, to get name/company, email, IP, of potential buyers, via form mail.... And need security, and high uptime of course.
(assuming wordpress handless security and uptime by itself. )
 
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Does anyone think Wordpress is good or bad for this purpose. Maybe create a page in 10 minutes, to get name/company, email, IP, of potential buyers, via form mail.... And need security, and high uptime of course.
(assuming wordpress handless security and uptime by itself. )
You mean wordpress.com as a service, not wordpress.org as software, do you not?

They certainly should be able to handle a lot of traffic. You can try, see what happens, and then come back and tell us!
 
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I didn't know there were more than one wordpress. .. I meant the easy (free or cheap) site building tool with its own hosting (just like blogspot, fb, etc.)
 
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I didn't know there were more than one wordpress. .. I meant the easy (free or cheap) site building tool with its own hosting (just like blogspot, fb, etc.)
There is the software wordpress.org, which you can use in your own hosting, to publish your own website, and there is the "blogging" provider wordpress.com, which provides you with a website they host, using that same software. They will charge you some money depending on what you want, or it can be free if you tolerate the existence of advertisement in your website. They will very probably will be able to host a website with plenty of traffic without any high issue.

You can certainly try and pay for their hosted wordpress.com solution, as you said, redirecting all your domains to that domain. It is simple although not as pretty and customizable as having your own thing. You can do it and see how it works. The main issue, certainly, is whether or not that kind of "lander" will convince people to buy a domain from you or not.
 
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I think the trust factor should not be under-estimated. Even though the payment is through a trusted, like PayPal, there still is the issue of trust that after payment the domain name will really arrive, and not have some other issue. People tend to trust big businesses, rightly or wrongly.

Yes, it is possible to make one's landers, but is it worth it if you lose some sales?

I think it might be worthwhile for those with huge portfolios and long experience in selling so they can do all the things the big players (HD, BD, DM etc.) do re testimonials, information, etc. to build trust.

For a typical investor with hundreds of domain names, I think probably they are better served through using marketplace or registrar landers.

Would be interested in A/B testing by a large seller who somehow randomly chose names from portfolio and put half on their own landers and half on marketplace landers, and at end of year see if different sell-through rates.

Great discussion, everyone. I think idea merits discussion on both technical and marketing aspects, even if I may seem to lean one way.

Bob
 
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How about a wordpress site (paid or not). I can redirect all domains on registrar side, and landing pages would be identical (the same), and have no reference to the domain (and I can still refer to it as "this domain").

WIll I still have security/bandwidth/ddos/resolving problems?

(for communication purpose only (including, knowing the buyer), no plan to sell at own site, all risks/verifications/chargebacks/payouts etc would be handled by the marketplace we choose (at the cost of commission).)
WordPress as CMS is ok. The main problems are the numerous plugins and third-party themes you may need to deploy along the line. In most cases they're prone to or not resilient to hacking. Unless you're ready to cough out additional $$ on security plugins.

Personally, I'll not deploy WP for managing domain portfolio. It's an overkill.

Regardless of the CMS, problem of security/bandwidth/ddos/resolving still persists. You must be able to handle them.

Further, it's naive to think that using the registrar(s), you can just redirect your domains to your marketplace or any landing page without additional strings of coding. Sure, at the registrar level you can use 301 forwarding for several domains. Problem here is that most registrars don't support bulk 301 forwarding. So using 301 forwarding you must edit each domain manually.

So if you have considerable amount of domains, your best bet will be to create nameservers for the marketplace domain. For example, ns1.mymarketplace.com/ns2.mymarketplace.com, glue it with the registrar.
Only after that can you use the nameservers to forward all other domains to your marketplace.
Just select the domains, create a template or directly edit the nameservers for them. You do it once, unlike 301 forwarding which you have to do for every domain.

At the receiving end (on your server), you'll need to create a zone file for the incoming domains, bind the zone to assign to the domains DNS SOA record and A record(s) and then parse a script that will generate the landing page on your marketplace or standalone site for the domain.

Some knowledge of server management will be required. You will also need root access to the server.
 
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Maybe create a page in 10 minutes
Buyers won't trust your spammy-looking site made in 10 minutes, so they won't buy from you. They will buy the domain on a trusted site, such as GoDaddy or Sedo.

I wouldn't even fill in your suspicious form, since it looks like you don't care about privacy (GDPR, CCPA etc.), since in 10 minutes it is impossible to implement a proper privacy policy.
 
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To those who made estimations, try and do it yourself first. Then, only then please comment.

The bottleneck is not traffic, or RAM etc. It's processing/ cores / threads. You can't do this on a regular VPS 8 or 16 cores VPS. It just hangs when a burst of traffic comes, even if you serve a single static page via an efficient server such as NGINX. And yes, an optimized server.


I rent unmanaged webservers for years in order to host my own websites. Some VPS's are more powerful than dedicated servers. There is not much difference between VPS, cloud and dedicated in terms of power. The main difference is whether the linux kernel is shared or not. I prefer dedicated servers.

It's possible to point thousands of domains to the same html static file. Then, the constraint would be RAM, rather than CPU. Because apache would cache it, php would cache it if configured so (if apache runs under php), mysql would cache it if the page is semidynamic. If nothing is cached, more CPU and less RAM would be needed. If everything is cached, less CPU and more RAM would be needed. RAM is cheaper and faster than CPU.

The main bottleneck would be knowledge.
 
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I rent unmanaged webservers for years in order to host my own websites. Some VPS's are more powerful than dedicated servers. There is not much difference between VPS, cloud and dedicated in terms of power. The main difference is whether the linux kernel is shared or not. I prefer dedicated servers.

It's possible to point thousands of domains to the same html static file. Then, the constraint would be RAM, rather than CPU. Because apache would cache it, php would cache it if configured so (if apache runs under php), mysql would cache it if the page is semidynamic. If nothing is cached, more CPU and less RAM would be needed. If everything is cached, less CPU and more RAM would be needed. RAM is cheaper and faster than CPU.

The main bottleneck would be knowledge.
You're starting wrong. They say that the one with half knowledge does worse than the without all the knowledge, if I might observe here.

Even if you have the general knowledge which is visible, you don't have with this one. I've said, it's not as easy as it seems. Caching, yes in principle is great for performance. But it depends. It's not a solve-it-all thing. Also regarding the kind of VPS that holds this well, it's cheaper to get a dedicated.

Apache is definitely not the right webserver for this. So indeed the main bottleneck is knowledge. Or having half of it.

Nginx is far better for this particular task. Actually, a custom webserver designed particularly for this task, using a fixed pool of threads and a large one would be best. I've written webservers at some point in time BTW, so I do know some stuff. But of course that'd be going too far.

Oh, and for caching, you don't do it that way, it's pointless to do it on the application server. There's a much better solution named HAProxy, put one in front of the thing. For images, you can use a CDN, but again, it all boils down to cost.

But having everything cached is NOT the solution for this particular application. Doing it means whatever you need to do dynamically (and you will) will have to be done via JS on client, which has, I'm afraid, drawbacks that will be visible in practice (one example, losing a portion of the traffic due to this requirement).

Also, any SQL server thing will have to be severely decoupled and used infrequently (basically to prime some sort of file based cache that will then be cached by the filesystem or some other mechanism) otherwise it's not going to work. Even opening a connection takes a ton of cpu power. I have not used any SQL server in my case because it'd be pointless. And it will have to run on an additional server = more cost.

Once again, this case needs the experience gotten in practice.

If you know what a mutex is, or a semaphore, and what extremely heavy concurrency means /requires, you'll understand that the issue here can't be solved via caching. Caching solves the scripting part, but the performance problem will manifest even if you only use a static file and cached by webserver. It's in the internal mechanisms of the webserver. You'll hit a performance wall even if you add a lot of RAM and many threads to the webserver. At some point it'll simply get worse. If you dont' see it yet, try pointing 30k names at the thing and observe.

I've said what and why, from already having done this, but it's not understoof. Therefore I rest my case.

Note for other posters here: And no, WP definitely aint' the right CMS for this kind of thing.
 
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I mean,.. there is a lead, and the actual buyer is willing to pay a nice amount, but because I'm dealing with an agent who controls the lead and trying to secure the lowest price on sellers side I can't sell. Not only this, for example there are lots of unpaid sales.. Say, I sell for 200, but the buyer doesn't pay, but still someone dropcatches it after drop. "Noone forcing you to drop": if things are so simple then arbitrage and shillbidding can be justified as well : nooone forcing you to pay/sell at an amount not acceptable to you.

I set a fixed price for each domain and leave no room for negotations. If there is nothing to negotiate on behalf of you or by you, marketplaces, potential buyers, watchers could do nothing dirty.

As to the main topic, I would advise shared hosting for those who is unable to manage servers.
 
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You're starting wrong. They say that the one with half knowledge does worse than the without all the knowledge, if I might observe here.

Even if you have the general knowledge which is visible, you don't have with this one. I've said, it's not as easy as it seems. Caching, yes in principle is great for performance. But it depends. It's not a solve-it-all thing. Also regarding the kind of VPS that holds this well, it's cheaper to get a dedicated.

Apache is definitely not the right webserver for this. So indeed the main bottleneck is knowledge. Or having half of it.

Nginx is far better for this particular task. Actually, a custom webserver designed particularly for this task, using a fixed pool of threads and a large one would be best. I've written webservers at some point in time BTW, so I do know some stuff. But of course that'd be going too far.

Oh, and for caching, you don't do it that way, it's pointless to do it on the application server. There's a much better solution named HAProxy, put one in front of the thing. For images, you can use a CDN, but again, it all boils down to cost.

But having everything cached is NOT the solution for this particular application. Doing it means whatever you need to do dynamically (and you will) will have to be done via JS on client, which has, I'm afraid, drawbacks that will be visible in practice (one example, losing a portion of the traffic due to this requirement).

Also, any SQL server thing will have to be severely decoupled and used infrequently (basically to prime some sort of file based cache that will then be cached by the filesystem or some other mechanism) otherwise it's not going to work. Even opening a connection takes a ton of cpu power. I have not used any SQL server in my case because it'd be pointless. And it will have to run on an additional server = more cost.

Once again, this case needs the experience gotten in practice.

If you know what a mutex is, or a semaphore, and what extremely heavy concurrency means /requires, you'll understand that the issue here can't be solved via caching. Caching solves the scripting part, but the performance problem will manifest even if you only use a static file and cached by webserver. It's in the internal mechanisms of the webserver. You'll hit a performance wall even if you add a lot of RAM and many threads to the webserver. At some point it'll simply get worse. If you dont' see it yet, try pointing 30k names at the thing and observe.

I've said what and why, from already having done this, but it's not understoof. Therefore I rest my case.

Note for other posters here: And no, WP definitely aint' the right CMS for this kind of thing.


If 1 domain receives 1k hits per day (assuming 2 static page elements), 30k domains receive 30M hits per day.
30M / 86,400 = 347 hits per second.

Can a server with 4 cpu cores at around 2 ghz speed handle it ?
 
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Buyers won't trust your spammy-looking site made in 10 minutes, so they won't buy from you. They will buy the domain on a trusted site, such as GoDaddy or Sedo.

They can't buy. Because you can't sell. You can't sell because you can't process payment, unless you consider Paypal and similar funny things as payment processors for domain sales. The point with landing pages is to inform visitors that the domain is for sale and how to contact. That's it, nothing more.

I wouldn't even fill in your suspicious form, since it looks like you don't care about privacy (GDPR, CCPA etc.), since in 10 minutes it is impossible to implement a proper privacy policy.

That's one of the reasons of why I don't use contact forms on my landing pages. Showing an email address is enough. They actually email and ask price. They don't care how the landing page is looking. They even don't care if there is no landing page and no sign on if the domain is for sale, however that's very rare. Their major concern is price. Because most people have really very strict, inelastic budgets. Even if they want the domain too much, they simply can not afford. Very few can afford to buy immediately. Nobody is interested in how well or ugly your landing page is looking. They know they won't buy your landing page.
 
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I need contact info+IP, because I want to be able to check quality of the lead. Then I can price it accordingly, or not put a price, or even respond. It makes big difference whether there is a buyer or not, and who that buyer is.
If we can't see it, Epik shouldn't see it either. What is Epik planning to do with all those messages intended for us, but essentially not shown to us, because the most critical parts are erased. ..At other marketplaces, they would be used for dropcatch. At registrars they would be used for grabbing after expiration. Not a fair business.

This is not about Epik directly,.. but let me guess what kind of mindset Epik is in. There is a lead, and they know it is high quality lead, but we would be happy with 1K, and "they don't want us to get scammed", and they would try to sell for 100K instead. And if successful, say,
keep 80K for themselves, 20K for us, so they are doing a great favor to us.. What is the problem then,.. because of their greed, we would lose many sales,.. buyers will think that 100K counteroffer comes from us, and not accept it, plus, if price is dropped in the future, they won't trust us.. Let me give an example,.. they asked how much we would sell a domain for, I listed it there, and also informed them, they were not telling me who the buyer was even before this hiding event. Why hide it.
Sedo landing pages have an email,.. why because some buyers will send an email instead, and Sedo can ask us the price, by offering 20 from a fake account.

There are lots of bugs at Epik marketplace, and they will never fix them. For example under "sold" link, there is only one sale which is 2 years old, although I sold many more domains there since then, which are not visible.
I choose "show 100 items per page", Epik gives error. How can we know there are no critical/dangerous errors, which would allow people to steal our domains for free. They won't appear under "sold", and maybe we won't get an email either, because there is no money going to masterbucks.
Why trust your engineers who screw up everything. Maybe all those bugs are intentional as well.
 
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I need contact info+IP, because I want to be able to check quality of the lead. Then I can price it accordingly, or not put a price, or even respond. It makes big difference whether there is a buyer or not, and who that buyer is.
If we can't see it, Epik shouldn't see it either. What is Epik planning to do with all those messages intended for us, but essentially not shown to us, because the most critical parts are erased. ..At other marketplaces, they would be used for dropcatch. At registrars they would be used for grabbing after expiration. Not a fair business.

With all respect, you are wrong, are making serious mistake without knowing.

You don't need IP. You need to sell. IP is nothing. Anyone can change real IP easily. Especially the buyers with fat wallets never visit landing pages with their real IP, VPN is not an expensive, luxury thing. Even if you have real IP info, real IP has no use in selling. IP won't tell you anything on the buyer or offer. If the offer isn't real, it has nothing to do with IP.

You have to know how much you want for your domain. If you don't know your price, then nothing will help. I know my price, qoute my price with a deadline if asked via email and leave the person alone to decide. It doesn't matter for me who the buyer is, as long as they pay me what I want for my domain. That's it. They will not be my close friends and we will not communicate after the sale. I don't need to know anything about them. That's my approach.

The main issue with your approach is the lack of fixed price. You don't know how much you will ask for your domains and are looking for a scapegoat. That's your main problem in my opinion and it's the problem created by you, not anyone else. You are searching the problem at wrong places such as marketplaces. If you don't know your price, nobody can know, including marketplaces and potential buyers. Seller has to lead everyone in pricing. If seller is not capable to lead, someone else leads and it will make everyone unhappy at the end of sales, buyers will always think they paid too much, seller will always think his/her domains are always sold for too cheap. Without having a fixed price confidently in mind you can't lead any type of sales. If you lead well, buyer will obey your confidence happily. That's human nature and you should bear in mind almost all sales are emotional, not rational, including sales to companies. People buy domains in order to feel better and companies are managed by people. Seller has to be confident in asking price to lead buyers. If a seller doesn't know the differences between $1k and $100k domains nothing can help, someone could buy for $80k and make $20k profit. Because this is free market.
 
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We can't add fixed prices because

1. We won't know if there is a serious buyer who can pay at most half of our asking price (and bring some liquidity)
2. We would have to sell our deleted domains, because we can't remove them from marketplaces fast enough when expired
3. And sometimes actual endusers may never know we have fixed price, for example we list at AN, and endusers go to GD, but they can't see our priced domains,.. agents see the price, and although our price may be cheap for endusers, they can be expensive for agents/flippers/"investors". AN can keep a domain "under review" forever. You can't challenge them. Even after responding to a price request, your price may not be seen by anyone. If there is a contradiction, marketplaces/agents would prefer to kill a sale, and erase all evidence instead of fixing "misunderstandings" and making a reasonable sale possible, meanwhile keeping the lead for themselves, and use it for dropcatching, or grabbing after expiration.

Tons of possibilities.

Shillbidding is ethical (and can't be prevented), arbitrage is not.

Why is shillbidding ethical (compared to arbitrage), because
you own the domain, you can prevent it from being sold to someone
below a certain amount (and for fairness, bidders should be aware of this possibility).

In arbitrage people try to make money (well above a reasonable commission, which can be 5 percent or 50 percent)
by selling someone else's domain, and in many cases either scam sellers, or prevent sales.
(there are fair arbitrage possibilities also, if there is no abuse of power, for example someone visits your registrar to
buy a domain, you see it listed at a fixed price elsewhere, and buy it and then sell ).
 
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I didn't mean setting fixed prices at marketplaces though it would not make things very complicated. As the topic is about landing pages, I mean having a fixed price in mind for direct sales. I would set BIN prices at AN and would offer a little lower to people who ask price via email. You have to remove domains marketplaces in time. If you can't, then just remove BIN. You can add and remove prices anytime.

^1. We won't know if there is a serious buyer who can pay at most half of our asking price (and bring some liquidity)

You shouldn't act based on possibilities of a single buyer. If you think the domain has only 1 potential buyer, you are usually wrong. If you aren't wrong on that then you aren't good at choosing good domains. If the domain has only 1 buyer, ask him how much he offers, don't tell him your price first. However you need to have a fixed price in mind and the point where you stop. Ideally you should hold domains with multiple potential buyers.
 
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How about a wordpress site (paid or not). I can redirect all domains on registrar side, and landing pages would be identical (the same), and have no reference to the domain (and I can still refer to it as "this domain").

WIll I still have security/bandwidth/ddos/resolving problems?

(for communication purpose only (including, knowing the buyer), no plan to sell at own site, all risks/verifications/chargebacks/payouts etc would be handled by the marketplace we choose (at the cost of commission).)
I am trying to just do a portfolio showcase on my site (if you want a poke about, its wpwebsites .net/domains and at the bottom of the page). Besides it all not aligning right and giving me headaches that way, it is also taking a million years to set up each individual page, create a logo etc. Im probably just going to do about 20, make it look nice and leave it. The amount of time its taking is painful.

I have my domains listed on dan, afternic, brandpa etc.

Namesilo was doing a nice free lander that shows all your domains you have for sale with them, but unfortunatly there is a glitch in my account and I can see other peoples domains in it (and they are taking 3 months to fix it, I see that as a security breach and will transfer everything out when I can afford it).

will probably try out some other ways, maybe look at efty, but as it stands, an ugly table and a quarter done showcase are it.
 
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This is an interesting thread and some of the responses are very information but I read the OP twice and couldn't understand what's the purpose of doing all this. As I understood here is what you want:

1. User types "example.com"
2. It redirects to "myownwebsite.com" which displays Example in title and other places and possibly in URL
3. The page has a contact form and other info for communication and a chatbox

What are you trying to achieve? You want to avoid paying commission by not listing domains on marketplace?
 
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Actually, a custom webserver designed particularly for this task, using a fixed pool of threads and a large one would be best. I've written webservers at some point in time BTW, so I do know some stuff.
If your portfolio was only a tad smaller you could serve it from CPU cache entirely.
 
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I will pay commission (somewhere) even if buyers don't want me to pay it , because the marketplace (can vary) handling the transaction will "take all the risks". 10-20 percent commssion is nothing, 1,000 percent commission (without my knowledge of course), or not being able to sell because of greed/evilness of the marketplace and other players is a lot; means 100 fold difference in sales. Of course I will be very angry, first Dan dead, and now Epik, no room left for fair business.
 
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This is an interesting thread and some of the responses are very information but I read the OP twice and couldn't understand what's the purpose of doing all this. As I understood here is what you want:

1. User types "example.com"
2. It redirects to "myownwebsite.com" which displays Example in title and other places and possibly in URL
3. The page has a contact form and other info for communication and a chatbox

What are you trying to achieve? You want to avoid paying commission by not listing domains on marketplace?
For me, I will put all my transactions through Dan, as I trust it more than paypal for domains and believe it is cheaper than escrow.

For me, I am trying to achieve showcasing more of the domain, putting more information on there. I could probably do that all with Dan, but its nice to have my main website where I sell websites (ready made and custom) and domains (new to register and already registered), and then have a page for each domain saying more about it and all with my branding. i havent done many yet, it is tedious!

Its just an experiment for me at the moment. I have some pages that are semi built websites, some that redirect to dan, some that have nothing on them and there will be some that redirect to the information on my main website. I will unscientifically see which ones I feel perform better and like more.
 
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Does anyone think Wordpress is good or bad for this purpose. Maybe create a page in 10 minutes, to get name/company, email, IP, of potential buyers, via form mail.... And need security, and high uptime of course.
(assuming wordpress handless security and uptime by itself. )

I recently start to use self-hosted wordpress for some of my landing pages,
Below example site is build with Wordpress + Oxygen Builder
https://ExcellenceDomain.com/
 
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Here is an idea
(not an original one).

I create a "one page" site.

People visit a domain, that domain is redirected to that site,
that page has the same content whatever the domain, except,
that domain name appears on the landing page and in the title, or maybe also in the url.
(better if I can customize further.)
No problem with resolving, and safe against ddos etc.

People can send me a message via email (form-mail)
(better also if I can also reply using the site)
they would provide their contact info, and I would also get their IP.
A chat option can be a bonus (online or offline).

Any such service? There must be lots of free services somewhere.
I prefer services which don't invest in domains.
No FB or linked in, or twitter.
No service requiring id, phone call, installing app etc.

(Here by cost, I don't mean money (only).
I mean, time, protection, avoiding headache,
looks, usefulness,..)

Great way to end up blacklisted by google they hate 1 page landing page sites

So all you do is get the site banned basically by Google by doing a crappy 1 page land page site

That is not development
 
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