The next challenge in our journey was creating the marketing channels. Kizuna India badminton strings needed a website. And the website needed a domain name. Kizuna.com was not available. The next best was Kizuna.in. It was taken. When we checked the details for Kizuna.in, it was found that the domain is registered by a Delhi based investor in domain names. We didn’t have the money to buy Kizuna.in from the investor for how much ever he was asking for. Kizuna.co.in was available, but we were not very happy with it due to the long extension.
During the early days of the corona virus, we, by chance found that the domain name Kizuna.in was not renewed. We thought that it could be an opportunity to get the desired domain name. May be the holder of the domain has lost interest in it after holding on to it for a long period of time and is going to let it go. We started monitoring it on a daily basis. Depending on the domain name provider it can take about 30-120 days for a domain. We talked to our domain service provider go daddy on how we can get hold of the domain name. Their opinion was to monitor on a daily basis to see when the domain will become available for purchase in the open market. The wait and the monitoring finally gave fruit at the end of about 96 days. The domain was available to buy in go daddy and we immediately purchased it.
The next thought was where to host the new website. Our websites bikazoom.com and lotus-sports.com are hosted with go daddy. Having faced some issues with hosting like the sites taking a lot of time to open especially on mobile devices and the inability of hosting plan to have multiple sites with https, we looked at our alternatives and zeroed in on Amazon AWS. They had a plan called light sail where we could try it for free for a month and they had a plan where we pay based on the traffic at the site. AWS also had a tie up with let’s encrypt (letsencrypt.org) which provides TLS 1.3 encryption free of cost. Https is a necessity for better search engine ranking. AWS also had bitnami frame work available which will help us host multiple technologies. This was required as bikazoom.com and lotus-sports.com were using different technologies.
Now we had to find a designer for the website and someone to implement the technology side at our budget. More about that in our next post.