Craic On

One thing that people forget when they buy a business is how web-driven businesses are nowadays. Some businesses even say that “we are our website”. So much business comes their way through it and it’s not just the Amazons and the ebays.

When I stuck up an article saying that the Caiseal Mara had been bought, I stuck a link to the article on the Caiseal Mara’s Facebook page.

It got me thinking “I wonder who owns the website” and “I wonder who owns the domain name”.

Search Engines

There will be links to the Caiseal Mara home page on loads of travel websites. Indeed they probably got a lot of their business that way, the same way the Redcastle does. Also, if you type in Caiseal Mara the very first thing that comes up on Google is the Caiseal Mara hotel. If you search for Moville Hotel it comes up quite a few times on the first page of Google.

That would be how quite a few people would have found the hotel and booked in the first place. Indeed, I know that many of the people who came for the DylanFests and BeatlesFest found it that way.

If the new owners have control of the website and domain name then they will be able to be up and running pretty sharply. Otherwise, they have to build the online side of the business from scratch – and that could cost them a lot of businesses till they build the brand name online.

Owners

So, who owns the website?

I don’t know, but more crucially I know who owns the domain name and without ownership of the domain name you can’t use the website.

Some businesses forget to make sure the website and the domain name are included in the sale – and then open themselves up to someone who has grabbed the domain name and then demands thousands of pounds to sell it back to them.

If a domain name runs out and someone else buys it then it is theirs. You could sue to stop them using the name but I doubt if you could sue to get them to hand it back.

Research

So, who owns the domain name. I did some research and here is the person who it is registered to:-

domain: CAISEALMARAHOTEL.COM
expires: 2014-10-19
modified: 2013-09-28 01:35:20
owner-contact-id: 33684
owner-name: Joe Byrne
owner-organisation:
owner-email: [email protected]
owner-voice: +353.749722802
owner-fax: +353.749723412
owner-addr: The Diamond
owner-city: Donegal Town
owner-province: Co. Donegal

The Owner

So the owner is a Joe Byrne from The Diamond in Donegal Town.

Who’s he? I haven’t a clue and a Google search reveals nothing about him.

There are several interesting things about the above info though.

Firstly, there is no name in the owner-organisation part. Perhaps he is just an individual.

Is he a website developer who developed it in the first place? If he was he would surely know how to advertise his services through the search engines like google and he is nowhere to be found.

Does he work for the previous owners who now don’t own the hotel but still own the website and domain name?

Name Grab

Or is it someone who saw that the domain name was running out and grabbed it for himself to sell back to the Caiseal Mara Hotel?

I don’t know, but it is a possibility. There are people who do that as a full-time way of making a living. I recently purchased a domain name from someone out in Belize recently.

If you notice, he has the domain name till 2014-10-19 when it will come up for renewal again.

Of even more interest is this “modified: 2013-09-28 01:35:20”.

What was it that was modified late last month when the hotel came up for sale?

Had the domain name run out? Did he notice it and buy it ready to sell it to the new owners?

Or was it just the name that was changed?

Take Care

I don’t know if the new owners read this website but if they do, or know someone who does, they would be well advised to find out if the website and the domain name came with the sale. Was it part of the assets that the banks grabbed?

It doesn’t looks as if it does but I may be wrong.

Also, the new owners may have thought of all this and have it covered. However, a hell of a lot of businesses don’t think of it and that can open them up to being forced to cough up a load of money to buy a domain name that would normally cost just about €7 a year to buy.