Suppose you want to start a blog (or any Web site) and have the perfect name in mind for it. The next step is to purchase your domain for a very reasonable $10 or so. You go to register the name and –Oops. Sorry mate, the name is taken. What can you do?
You could always look up the owner on Whois.com and make an offer for the domain. Any realistic chance of someone selling a domain for a reasonable price? Probably not. But you notice on Whois that the domain name just expired. Oh joy! Now it is just a matter of picking up the name the usual way. Or is it?
Purchasing expired or expiring domain names has become a shady and cut-throat business. As a matter of fact, the odds of snagging an expiring name that is remotely desirable is about zero. That is where several services come into the picture and that is also where “shady” comes into the picture.
In my own case, there is a domain name that I have lusted over for the past six months. It is an important name to me because it happens to be the title to a book I have coming out this Fall. When I first investigated the name, I found that the site was not active and that the domain was set to expire in a couple of months. So, just sit back and pick the name up on May 5, 2006, the date of expiration. But wait, there is a grace period of forty days in which the site is “expired” but the owner can still pay the usual fee. Ok, wait ’til June 5 and pick up the name. But wait, the site still was not available. What’s going on?
Next is a redemption period where the owner can redeem the expired site for a fee somewhere in the $100 range. Well, OK, if the owner wasn’t interested in spending $10 for the site, he sure isn’t going to spend ten times that amount to redeem. No problem, wait another ten days for the redemption period, then pick the site up for $10. But wait, next is the deletion phase that lasts five days.
So, the actual time for a domain name to go from the expiration date to back on the market is actually 75 days. OK, no real problem. Just wait 75 days and buy the name for $10. No, still not correct.
It seems that very few names that are desireable come back on the market. If you want to be sure that you have a chance at the name, you almost have to use one of the major backorder services. Even then, there is no guarantee -even if you pay big bucks just for the attempt. For the lowdown on what to do, visit this thread and read the hundreds of comments. I’ll post the results of my own quest to grab an expired domain in the near future.
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