A coffee roaster I know spent three years building a brand. Beautiful packaging. Growing wholesale accounts. Then she went to register her brand name as a .com domain. Taken. Someone in another country had registered it two years earlier — not to use, but to sell at a markup. They wanted USD 2,500 for it.
She could have registered it herself for about RWF 15,000 back when she started. Instead, she’s now using a longer, less memorable domain name that doesn’t match her brand perfectly.
How domain squatting works
Domain squatters register brand-relevant domains cheaply and wait for the brand owner to come looking. They’re betting that your brand will grow and you’ll eventually need the domain badly enough to pay a premium.
While there are legal protections against this (especially for trademarked names), the process of reclaiming a domain is slow, expensive, and not guaranteed. It’s far cheaper and simpler to register it yourself early.
What to register now
At minimum, register:
- yourbusiness.com — the global default
- yourbusiness.rw — the Rwanda-specific extension
- Any obvious misspellings or abbreviations
The total cost for two domains is roughly RWF 45,000–65,000 per year. That’s the price of protecting your brand online.
Even if you don’t have a website yet
You don’t need a website to register a domain. Register the domain now, build the website later. The domain sits there, reserved in your name, ready whenever you are.
Think of it as buying a plot of land. You don’t need to build immediately. But if you wait, someone else might buy that plot.
How to register
For .com: Use Namecheap, Cloudflare, or Google Domains. Takes five minutes and costs about RWF 15,000/year.
For .rw: Use an RDB-accredited registrar. Takes a few days and costs about RWF 25,000–35,000/year.
Or let your website provider handle it. Kisimenti includes domain registration in their packages — free on yearly plans.
Stop reading this article and go check if your business name is available as a .com and .rw. If it is, register it today. If it’s not, you’ll wish you had.