Every once in a while I come across a domain that makes me stop and take a second look. Royal.health was one of those names. It’s short, it’s memorable, and the keyword is a natural fit with the extension. When I first reached out to Ibrahem Abdelghany earlier this year, I wanted to hear about the business he was running on the domain and how the name fit into his plans.
Six months later the story had changed a little, which honestly makes it more interesting. Ibrahem has owned Royal.health since 2019 and spent real time trying to turn it into something profitable. It didn’t work out the way he planned, and the domain is for sale now. Instead of walking away from the idea, though, he’s running the experiment again on another .health name, Doha.health. I wanted to know what he learned, why he still sees something in the extension, and whether building on these names changed how he looks at domain investing.
His answers went further than I expected. There’s a dentist who quit dentistry, a former political blog, patient records that keep landing in his inbox by mistake, and a healthcare directory running on a free Google spreadsheet.
Sully: Let’s start with your background. Tell us a little about yourself and what you were doing before you became interested in domain names.
Ibrahem: Thank you for having me, Mike. I was a dentist. I live in Egypt and graduated from Minia University in 2005. In 2019 I quit dental practice, and I hold an MBA in marketing management from the Arab Academy (AASTMT) in Alexandria.
I worked for a mega laboratory in Egypt called Royal Lab, which is what made me think of buying Royal.health in the first place. I left, and now I’m a part-time domainer.
Since 2007 and up until now, I’ve also worked for the Egyptian Ministry of Health in Alexandria.
Sully: How did you first get involved with domain names? Were you initially buying domains for your own projects, or did you see them as investments from the beginning?
Ibrahem: Since 2003, when I bought my first domain, I only acquired domains for serious web projects.
My first one was hemanet.net. I built simple HTML pages explaining in Arabic how to build websites using Microsoft FrontPage, and I installed an Invision Power Board forum. Unfortunately I lost it.
Then in 2007 I built my first personal blog at thwab.com, with a political purpose in mind against the Mubarak regime in Egypt, until the revolution erupted in 2011. Unfortunately I lost that one too, a couple of years later.
I’m still holding Abdelghany.com, which I’ve had since 2005, for my personal blog, and Araby.org since 2007. That one was a project to build bridges between the non-Arab world and Arabic communities, but I shut it down and I’m offering the domain for sale now too.
I started seeing domains as an investment a few months ago, around May of this year, after my view of digital assets changed overall. We all look backwards now at something like bitcoin and see how these assets could be a fortune over time.
I also watched some YouTube videos from the Arabic domainer Mr. Ayoub Kehel and checked the actual sales at NameBio. I was surprised, and interested enough that I didn’t think twice about learning more and discovering this business, to see what I’d missed in those 20 years of my life. During these few months I’ve learned a lot from you too, and from many other domainers and investors.
Sully: You have owned Royal.health since 2019. How did you originally come across the domain?
Ibrahem: Like I said, I was working for a mega lab in Egypt with the same name, so I bought it to test some new ideas and possible alternatives to their official website. After they moved me from the digital marketing department to operations, I kept the domain idle for possible future projects, which I came back to after I left Royal Lab.
Sully: You mentioned that you were testing the potential of making Royal.health profitable. What business models did you try? On the other side, what didn’t work the way you thought it would?
Ibrahem: After I quit Royal Lab, I found myself with enough time to try a new project on the domain, and at the same time learn the new trends in web development rather than just downloading and installing ready-made software like WordPress. So I used an Astro blog, generated some generic articles with AI (or let’s call it SI), and tried the classic route: SEO plus Google AdSense, to get visitors from Google search and revenue from ads.
But I found out I was years late to the radical changes in this industry. The results I saw in Google Search Console were near zero, and the site was rejected by AdSense.
The situation with Doha.health is a little more interesting. I updated my knowledge with fresh SEO techniques and started with a fresh domain and real data I curated from Google Maps, using Hugo as a CMS. The results in Search Console were immediately impressive, until I submitted the sitemap. Then they suddenly dropped to near zero again.
I’m disappointed again, and it makes me think seriously about Google Search Console as a booby trap for developers and content creators who are trying to make something that looks ordinary but is built with a different mindset on the backend. I’m still testing it either way, but over a longer period of time.
Sully’s note: Google describes sitemap submission as a way to help it discover pages, with no guarantee that those pages will be crawled or indexed. The drop Ibrahem describes happened after he submitted a sitemap, but that timing alone doesn’t tell us what caused it. We’d need more information to draw a conclusion about his site.
Sully: Healthcare is an industry where trust is extremely important. Do you think a domain like Royal.health can create additional credibility compared with a longer .com domain?
Ibrahem: Healthcare personnel are rarely involved in web development technicalities, and I still personally meet friends who know nothing about this relatively new gTLD, including .dental and .healthcare. And for users, as we apparently see, .com is the most popular worldwide, outnumbering every other TLD of all kinds.
So the domain Royal.health itself is still very young. But for future credibility, yes, I believe it holds huge potential, especially with the large number of credible businesses using this name and its variations in the industry. They just haven’t adopted these relatively new extensions yet.
Sully: Did you ever have people comment specifically on the Royal.health domain while you were operating the site?
Ibrahem: In 2022 I received two anonymous acquisition offers, for $1,500 and $2,000. But as I said, I was holding for a future project and wasn’t serious about selling at that time, so I asked for an unrealistic price to make them forget about it.
Nothing else deserves to be mentioned, and I don’t usually enable commenting on my test projects. Whoever wants to tell me something, I always offer my email for direct contact. Even your email for this interview didn’t grab my attention at first, because it wasn’t related to the feedback I was expecting from those generic articles.
Sully: Did the domain receive meaningful type-in traffic or search engine traffic on its own, or did most visitors come from your marketing efforts?
Ibrahem: The domain doesn’t only receive type-in traffic. I even receive misdirected emails with documents and sensitive personal data, and I find myself obligated to forward them to the right person, because it seems to be part of a process, and a delay in the right person receiving that email would end up delaying healthcare that should be delivered to those patients on time.
I don’t have numbers for type-in traffic. In most of my outbound email I don’t send links, and even if I put a link in, it’s rarely clicked by a real human, because people already know how dangerous it is to click a link from an unknown contact.
Besides that, almost all the marketplaces, like GoDaddy, Spaceship, Dynadot and even Atom, don’t provide enough detail about visitors, let alone accurate human visits. So I’m trying to figure it out with Cloudflare, periodically changing the URL to redirect to the for-sale page at GoDaddy, Atom and Dynadot, to see which one records human visitors more accurately based on what Cloudflare records about overall requests. Then I’ll think about how to separate type-in traffic from marketing efforts.
Search engine traffic isn’t a factor at all in this situation. The marketplaces don’t show domains for sale on the first pages of results, and the very few people who search literally for “Royal.health” won’t find any for-sale page from any marketplace. So I ignore that source completely.
Recently, Atom adopted RFC 10023, so every eligible listing gets a machine-readable “for sale” signal. I added those records manually, with the furi pointing to the GoDaddy or Atom landing page. I still can’t figure out the traffic from that source, but I think it will be a negligible number too. I’ll wait and see.
Sully: Royal.health is now for sale. What ultimately led you to decide it was time to sell rather than continue developing it?
Ibrahem: To be honest, money. This domain and Araby.org are the most valuable domains I have, and maybe the ones I’m most emotionally connected with, and I need to liquidate them, or something else in my portfolio, for a reasonable price. As for development, I know I won’t be able to do anything creative as long as I’m not financially stable and don’t have a reasonable amount of time. I don’t have either.
Maybe after I sell or flip a couple of domains I’ll come back with a new project, or do what you and Mr. Kehel do and help other people improve their financial situation through what so far seems to me a simple, low-budget business with reasonable profits.
I hope I can do all of this at once, a new project and a new out-of-the-box formula to help people in Egypt and in low-income nations improve their personal financial position with a low-budget business and reasonable profits. I know I can do it one day.
Sully: You’re now experimenting with Doha.health. Doha.health is very different from Royal.health because it combines a major geographic location with the .health extension. What made you interested in that combination?
Ibrahem: Qatar is a major player and at the top of the list of the best healthcare systems around the world, and at the same time it’s a very small country with a small number of healthcare facilities, few enough that I can handle them alone and keep the data updated.
Besides SEO, I was mainly thinking about cheap or zero-cost technology that could be used to create a healthcare map for Egypt.
Let me tell you that all the data at Doha.health is saved and updated in free Google Spreadsheets. No database, no sophisticated dashboard, just tables. Once they’re updated, the new deployment with Hugo handles all that data and does whatever manipulation is needed to deliver it as simply and minimally as possible to the user’s mobile browser.
This model could work perfectly one day for a large, low-income country like Egypt or India, or any African nation, to help people find the nearest healthcare provider on one simple, clean, lightweight page, even on an old smartphone. And the whole stack costs nothing: Google Sheets, Hugo, Vercel or Cloudflare, and a GitHub account.
Sully: After owning and developing .health domains for several years, what is your opinion of the extension today? Do you see .health primarily as an extension for development, or do you think it also has potential for domain investors?
Ibrahem: Yes, .health is perfect, but for very long-term investment, more than any other gTLD in my opinion. It isn’t relatively cheap either. But maybe with the rise of .ai and .si, and with vibe coding, people will adopt .health for their healthcare businesses in the future.
The major marketplace appraisal systems also need to take it seriously enough to guarantee some degree of fair trading.
So for the time being, and according to my very limited experience in domain investment, only very long-term investment in a very few relevant one-word or two-to-four-letter domains could be fruitful. I hope mine will be one of those very few .health names that sell for low five figures.
I appreciate Ibrahem being open about what he tried and why he’s selling. Plenty of us have bought a domain with a project in mind and found that getting it off the ground took more time or money than we had. I’m interested in seeing where he takes the directory idea, particularly if he gets the chance to build one for Egypt. You can find him at Abdelghany.com.