hello, my name is
nathan pitman.

Catching an expiring domain name Aug 17. 082

From the moment that I decided to go it alone and start my own business with my wife 3 years back I was keen to ensure that I bagged a .com as our primary domain. However it very soon became obvious that the chances of settling on a name that we were happy with and it being available as a .com were pretty much nil.

After what seemed like an age we settled on a name (Nine Four) and purchased the only available domains, the .co.uk and .net. The .com was already registered but not in use so we held out some small hope that we might manage to get hold of it one day.

How much?

In October 2006, just over a year after we started the business I decided to approach the current domain name owner, hoping that a reasonable offer might be well received. However he was clearly not in the mood to be reasonable and wanted no less than $25,000. Obviously I declined.

Thanks for the reminder

Almost another 2 years passed and to be honest I had for the most part forgotten about the .com. Resigning myself to the fact that I would never be able to get hold of it and that perhaps it wasn’t so important after all.

On the 6th of August I received an email from a company called Tripod UK Ltd alerting me to the fact that ninefour.com had not been renewed by it’s previous owner and that it was soon to be released. They claimed an 80% success rate in catching dropping domains but you know what… I fancied giving it a shot myself.

So I read up on Mike Davidson’s Blog about his experience snatching ‘newsvine.com’ and formulated a plan of attack.

Drop what?

After a certain period (usually 75 days) a domain name ‘drops’ and becomes available for re-registration. The trick is to know exactly when the drop will occur. Unfortunately there’s no way of being privy to the exact time or date so as Mike suggests, your best bet is to enlist the services of a company that will continually monitor the status of the domain name for you and automatically attempt to register it as soon as it becomes available.

Mike suggests using SnapNames.com, Enom.com and Pool.com. Enom.com didn’t seem to have an obvious option for back-ordering a domain name so in the end I went with NameJet.com.

SnapNames seemed like it was going to be my best bet as they have a clear and open auction process and if there was no competition for the domain when it dropped they would automatically register it for me for just $60.

NameJet seemed to offer a similar service to SnapNames but Pool was a lot less enticing. Although I didn’t get to experience their auction process in the end, from what I read on Mikes blog it isn’t great for the buyer, only great for Pool.

The auction

I was one of the lucky ones I guess because SnapNames bagged ninefour.com. I soon discovered though that I was not the only bidder, there were two of us… I guess it could have been much worse.

My counterpart had opened the bidding at $60. I had set a maximum bid amount of $300 prior to the auction so SnapNames had automatically bid on my behalf to $70. The auction process lasts between one and fourteen days, in this case the auction was 7 days so I made a note in the diary and got back to work.

A week later I was regularly refreshing the SnapNames auction page to check the status of the order as the hours counted down. With no come back bid from my counterpart I was feeling confident. I did a little research online based on his/her SnapNames username and found that s/he had a history of opening the bidding on a number of names but didn’t seem to bid any further. This was all good. :)

The last minutes

With less than 10 minutes to go I’m outbid. I was gutted, all of a sudden from nowhere the other bidder had upped the ante. After a few minutes Jo and I decided to up our maximum bid. SnapNames extends the auction end time by 5 minutes every time a new winning bid is placed so we knew we had to be bold. We entered a maximum bid of $800 and sat tight. 10 minutes or so later we were the proud new owners of ninefour.com, the final bid being $579.

It was more than we had hoped to spend but I think it was worth it. As a business your brand is probably one of your most valuable assets (in addition to your employees!) so in that context $579 seems like a small price to pay. Certainly beats $25,000!