I’ve heard that a lot of the smaller domain registration sites will wait until your lease on the domain expires and without notifying the owner, they sell it to someone else at a higher price or register it themselves and try to sell it to the previous owner for more money.
I’ve only had a domain once, which I did get cheap (ten bucks for one year), but I was too busy to maintain the site and took it offline with about three months remaining in my year, plus the webmail account I used to register expired because I stopped using it, so I don’t know if they tried to notify me or not. Either way, I didn’t care.
Now, I’m thinking of registering a domain but I don’t want to pay $70.00 for two years (or anything close to that) to register.com or any of the other big name sites, but I’m afraid of having the domain stolen by a cheap site. Can they really do this? Is there a way to protect myself?
They’ve done it to me a couple times, both with domains that noone else would want. It’s my own fault for not renewing them in time, but it really pissed me off.
There is always a market for domain names with traffic. If your domain expires and still has links directed to it from other sites or search engines then it has traffic and has value.
It makes no difference what the domain name is, it’s the traffic that makes it valuable.
As far as cheap registration sites “stealing” a domain, it has never happened to me and I’ve registered hundreds. But, just as anything else of value, you have to protect your own interests. By not relying on others to remind you to renew your registration and keeping an independant database of your domain names and expiration dates you will know when your registration expires and where you need to go to renew it.
Btw- even tho I said I’ve never been taken on a domain name I’ve owned I have been scammed. I once did a bulk whois search of 35 domain names that I thought valuable enough to register. I did this search on a site that I’d never used before and they offered registration for $13.95 back in 1999. Of the 35 domains all but 14 had been registered but when I went back the next day to register the 14, all had been registered by the same individual. I know several ways that this could have happened and none of my theories involved chance or coincedence. So, be careful about even typing in a valuable domain name on a site you are not sure of. It could be compared with a patent search, never divulge your idea until you’ve protected your interests.
There is nothing that says a registrar can’t sell your name to somone else if you don’t renew it when it expires. However, for that registrar to register the name itself is considered warehousing and very much frowned upon by ICANN. Registrars are not supposed to speculate on domain names.
I worked for a major registrar and they were accused of doing this in a bit of a roundabout way and got some bad publicity. They backed out of it and cleaned up their act.
Absolutely true. But there was no traffic in my case. One for example made reference to my family name. It was used exclusively for email, never had a web presence or any other traffic.
Three days after it expired, I went to try and renew it, and someone in italy had bought it. I contacted them, and it was clear that the only reason they bought it was because it had expired and they hoped the previous owner would be interested enough to give them a premium for it.
I would sooner change my personal domain and all the pain associated therewith than give a dime to those sorts of people, so they are now the happy owners of my ex-domain.
I’ve had this happen a couple other times as well.