There is a domain name that I would like to register.
According to WHOIS, the current registration will expire tomorrow (July 18).
I understand that the domain name will not be made available immediately (possibly for up to a month or longer) in order to give the current registrant a chance to renew.
Assuming he doesn’t renew, how can I be sure to get this name when it becomes available? I don’t want to risk anyone else “jumping” on the name before I do. On the other hand, I don’t want to query the database every day either. I’m sure that these queries are tracked and that some domain registrar will snap up a name that’s had X number of queries about it in the last month before it becomes available to the public.
Any suggestions? I’d really love to get this name (assuming it becomes available at all), and don’t want to miss out on it.
i have had this exact same question before… so here are the answers i found :
i wrote to networksolutions.com telling them that i’d like to know when an expired domain name would be made available to others wishing to purchase it at the end of the expiry date.
they replied saying that even after expiry of the domain name, the current owner gets a grace period in which to re-purchase the domain name for a further period… assuming that said owner does not respond or is not interested in extending the domain name period… the domain name will eventually be deleted from their database and released to the public.
i wrote back asking when such a deletion takes place, i.e., howmuch after expiry of a domain name. they replied that they have a delete cycle, that essentially piles up non-renewed domain names, and then deletes them in a batch. so depending on how close the expiry is to the deletion would determine when the domain is deleted from their database and made available to the public. In my experience, a domain name which was listed as expired in Dec 2001 was not deleted even in Feb 2002 and was subsequently renewed by the old owner sometime in march. Networksolutions.com said that they didn’t have set dates for the deletions, and that it depended on many factors, so it’s not like every week or every month that all expired domain names are deleted. They said it varied greatly and they couldn’t even tell me when the next delete cycle would take place.
Yes there is a way to snap them up as soon as they are released to the public. But you have by now understood that if the previous owner renews it after expiry and before deletion he still gets it before you, regardless.
So there are websites offering services to cater to your requirement:
the free service just informs me when there’s a change in the registrar information. The paid service buys it as soon as it’s released to the public.
This might not be a 100% sure method, 'coz it might be possible that multiple people have signed up to snap the same domain name from different website services. Their site explains all this in more detail.
the point is, handy, once the current owner knows that Zev wants the domain name, s/he will either hike up the selling price or renew it anyway to prevent Zev from having it at market price.
we’ve not come a long way from the days of “if you want that toy i want it too even if i didn’t want it before you wanted it”
xash, yeah, thats a risk we take with anything these days.
Another thing that you also have to figure in is that
the people who went to that site before are coming to the new site thinking its like the old site
& they might be surprised.
