VMOps invests in great domain name; rebrands.
Cloud computing company VMOps has purchased the domain name Cloud.com from Meetup co-founder Scott Heiferman and is rebranding its company as cloud.com.
Heiferman put the domain name up for auction at various cloud computing conferences early last year. According to historical whois records, Heiferman transferred the domain name to VMOps around February 17, 2010, at which point the whois record changed to a private registration.
I have reached out to the company to try to determine the purchase price and will update this story when I receive a response. The company declined to disclose the sales price given a non-disclosure agreement with Heiferman. But VMOps just picked up a $17 million funding, so it certainly had the money to invest in this domain name.
Cloud.com was registered in 2000. It’s another example of a domain that grew in value after the initial dot.com gold rush. Much like other new terms such as “blog”, “cloud” had limited use and value before the advent and popularization of cloud computing.
Aron says
Wow, great name and great sale.
Eager to see the price as well (if they feel like disclosing it)
Aron
Brian Null says
the year 2000 seems pretty late for the registration date on Cloud.com ? surely can’t be?
fizz says
Looks like it was first regged in 1996 and looks to have had a few different owners/drops.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/cloud.com
Brian Null says
thanks fizz, that makes more sense 🙂
Andrew Allemann says
@ Brian – yes, that was the most recent registration. But fair point — the domain was registered earlier as a generic but the term became more important over the past few years.
Brian Null says
agree Andrew, Cloud has become a very big term in recent years and continues to grow in importance
Domo says
Any wild guesses on the amount?
I heard he was previously asking 7 figures for it…
Domo