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How I almost lost a domain name this week

by — Expired Domains 20 Comments

Follow these two tips to avoid having the same thing happen to you.

Picture of expired parking meter.

I almost lost a good domain name due to expiration this week. I learned some lessons, so I’m recounting what happened to make sure this doesn’t happen to you.

I won the domain name in a NameJet auction nearly a year ago and the domain was at Register.com. It’s a fairly good domain name; I had two different inquiries on the domain last year including one from a large company.

Yesterday I received a DomainTools registrant alert that showed that the domain changed from my company name to Perfect Privacy, LLC. That’s the proxy service for Web.com registrars Register.com and Network Solutions.

Concerned, I went to my Register.com account and saw that the domain expired three days ago.

I do not recall receiving any of the ICANN-mandated notices from Register.com about my domain expiring. This doesn’t mean they didn’t send them. Most email from Register.com lands in my spam box because they send so much promotional email–one per day!

These promotional emails often start with “Urgent” or “Alert” even when it’s not important. It’s just a sales pitch for search engine optimization. So it’s easy to overlook them.

Regardless of whether they sent the notices or not, here are two tips to make sure this doesn’t happen to you.

1. Use an alert service like DomainTools or DomainIQ to get notifications when your Whois changes. Unfortunately, GDPR means your info isn’t always in Whois, but you can also track domain status changes that will alert you that your domain has expired.

2. Transfer domains you win in expired domain auctions to your main registrar on a regular schedule. For example, set up a once-a-quarter reminder on your calendar to transfer domains.

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Sedo makes expired list downloadable, Name.com changes happy hour

by — Expired Domains 2 Comments

Download lists to look for good domains, and you now have longer to buy discounted domains at Name.com.

Picture of downloadable list option on Sedo

Sedo’s expired domain lists are now downlodable.

A couple of quick news items for you on this Monday morning…

Sedo made its expired domain name inventory list downloadable. The marketplace auctions off expiring domain names from registrar 1&1 which is part of the same company as Sedo. But sorting through the list to find good domains is difficult. Now you can download the list and run it through services like Estibot to find the best domains. I also hope this means that expired domain data sites like ExpiredDomains.net start to provide data on these domains.

Also, Name.com has ended its Happy Hour sale concept in favor of monthly specials. The Name.com Happy Hour was a special promo (usually on one top level domain) that ran for a short time on Thursday afternoons. It’s a lot of effort to schedule time to register a domain to save a few bucks. Now, Name.com has a week-long sale each month. The kicker is you need to go to the sale page and get the discount code to get the discount. You’ll pay more if you try to register one of the sale domains and don’t use the discount code.

This month’s sale includes 30 new top level domains, most from Donuts’ portfolio. Donuts owns Name.com.

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GMO is sending expired domains to GoDaddy Auctions

by — Expired Domains 2 Comments

GoDaddy Auctions has landed another top 10 domain registrar.

GoDaddy Auctions has apparently picked up another registrar partner for its expired domain auctions: GMO. GMO domains are currently listed in GoDaddy’s expired domain auctions. [Update: as of 1/9/19, it appears GMO domains are back at SnapNames. I’ll update this story if that changes.]

GMO is a Japan-based registrar and is one of the top ten domain registrars in the world in terms of .com domains registered. The registrar has about 2 million .com domains under management.

This new addition means that GoDaddy is monetizing at least some of the expired domain inventory from half of the top ten registrars. It also has partnerships with Tucows, Endurance International Group, and Namecheap.

Earlier this week Web.com announced that it had bought out its partner Tucows and is now the sole owner of NameJet. NameJet currently sells expired inventory from Web.com registrars Network Solutions and Register.com as well as inventory from Enom, which is owned by Tucows.

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Web.com acquires Tucows’ half of NameJet

by — Expired Domains 0 Comments

Deal is a sign of the times in the expired domain business.

Web.com is now the sole owner of domain name auction site NameJet after acquiring Tucows’ (NASDAQ: TCX) interest in the business.

NameJet was created as a partnership between Enom and Network Solutions (now part of Web.com) in 2007 at a time when SnapNames was dominating the direct-transfer expired domain business. The deal meant that Network Solutions’ expired domain inventory would move to the new NameJet platform, delivering a blow to SnapNames. Oversee.net had just acquired SnapNames but knew about Network Solutions leaving the platform before completing the acquisition.

In 2014, Web.com acquired Snapnames from KeyDrive for $7.4 million. That meant that Web.com owned all of Snapnames and half of its competitor NameJet.

SnapNames and NameJet later combined forces on grabbing pending delete domains, which are domains that make it through the deletion cycle and are deleted by the registry.

Tucows acquired Enom last year and Enom’s half ownership in NameJet was a sort of “gift with purchase”. After the acquisition closed, Tucows shifted its expired domain name inventory from GoDaddy to NameJet, only to switch back to GoDaddy later in the year.

This was a big indication that GoDaddy was far better at monetizing Tucows’ expiring domain names than NameJet.

Today’s news makes sense. In fact, it probably makes sense to merge the SnapNames and NameJet platforms.

The big question is if Enom domains will remain on NameJet and for how long. This was obviously part of the negotiation and ultimate purchase price. If Enom leaves the platform for GoDaddy at some point in the future, it will further degrade NameJet’s role in the marketplace.

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.AI begins auctioning expired domain names

by — Expired Domains 0 Comments

Anguilla’s registry cuts out the middleman and begins auctioning expired domain names.

Anguilla’s ccTLD registry is auctioning expired domains.

The registry for country code domain name .AI (Anguilla) has started auctioning off domain names that previous registrants let expire. The auctions run differently than on most expired domain auction sites.

Auctions run only once a month for ten days. They start on the third Friday of each month and run for ten days. Also, any bids placed in the final hour extend the auction by an hour, which is much longer than most platforms extend bidding for late bids.

Starting bids are $100 with $10 increments.

In order to bid, users need to create an account and deposit at least $100. Users can pay with a credit card, wire transfer or bitcoin. There’s a 60 day delay to transfer a domain if you pay with a credit card.

Also, note that .AI has a $100 transfer fee that doesn’t extend the registration. So if you want to transfer the domain to another registrar, you need to factor in another $100 to the price.

The .AI registry has licenced the software used by Park.io to run its platform.

For the auction that ends on Monday, Customer.ai is currently the top domain with 14 bids and a $3,343 price. Other available names include BTC.ai, Strategy.AI, Target.ai and Ledger.ai.

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