By Carlos Mendes, owner of “El Grano Dorado” café
Hello! My name is Carlos, and I own a small but very cozy coffee shop in Barcelona. Our coffee is great, but our online presence was a mess. I decided we needed a proper website, and my main goal was to find a domain with history so I wouldn’t have to start from scratch.
A friend of mine in IT suggested looking for “expired” domains but warned me: it’s like treasure hunting—without the right map, you might run into pirates. Since every euro counts, I decided to figure it out myself and find the best solution.
My Goal: A Domain That Breathes
I needed a domain that matched these criteria:
- Theme: coffee, café, Barcelona
- Extension: .es (Spain) or .com
- History: no gambling, adult, or other “dirty” topics
- Age: the older, the better
- Language: Spanish
- Budget: up to €200
To figure out which tool was best for me as a small business owner, I tested the three most popular platforms I’d heard about.
Round 1: ExpiredDomains.net — Free but Complicated
My friend said this was the best starting point since it’s free. And he was right: I quickly found massive lists of domains. I set filters for .es and keywords like cafe, barcelona, grano.
My experience: At first, I was thrilled. Thousands of domains! But then I realized that was just the beginning. The platform didn’t provide any historical data. I had to manually check each one in the Wayback Machine and other tools. It took me over an hour, and I felt more like a detective than a café owner. Out of the 10 domains I checked, only one had a clean history.
Conclusion: If you’ve got plenty of free time and don’t mind tedious work, this service is great. But for someone like me—running a coffee bar—it was too time-consuming.
Round 2: Spamzilla — Fast but Shallow
My friend described Spamzilla as a “super filter” that quickly weeds out junk. So I gave it a shot. I entered my criteria, and it showed me 30 domains it considered good.
My experience: This was much faster than ExpiredDomains.net. The service displayed metrics, and I saw that the domains had backlinks. I felt relieved. But when I double-checked one in the Wayback Machine, I was horrified. A domain with excellent metrics had actually been a gambling site in 2018! I almost bought myself a headache. I realized Spamzilla focuses only on numbers, not on real history. It’s like buying a car based on its color without looking under the hood.
Conclusion: Spamzilla is about speed, not reliability. I wouldn’t trust it for a final choice.
Round 3: Karma.Domains — My Hero!
I was ready to give up, but I decided to try one last platform: Karma.Domains for expired domains. I’d heard it analyzed domain history. I was skeptical but gave it a chance.
My experience: I set my filters—Spanish language, keywords like cafe and barcelona, excluding gambling. The service gave me only 15 domains. That seemed small, but then I opened one report—elgrano.es—and I was blown away.
The service showed me the entire history of the domain:
- It was a coffee blog from 2015 to 2020.
- No “dirty” topics whatsoever.
- The Karma Score was very high.
- It was available for direct registration, no auction needed.
I immediately bought the domain from my phone in just 5 minutes—without wasting hours on manual checks.
Final Result: My Big Win
I bought elgrano.es for just €75. The domain already breathes my café’s theme, and I’m sure Google will value that.
My takeaways:
- ExpiredDomains.net — for adventurers. Free, but very time-consuming.
- Spamzilla — for numbers people who don’t mind risks. Fast, but superficial.
- Karma.Domains — for those who value their time and want reliable results. It doesn’t just find domains; it tells their story.
In the end, I realized it’s better to pay for a good tool than to deal with problems later. My café is my passion, and I can’t risk its reputation.