Article by Arpit

Recently found myself in the position of wanting to register a domain which was owned by someone else. The domain was set to expire in a week, and I figured there was a decent chance that the person who owned it wouldn’t be renewing it. Upon consulting the WhoIs registry on the current owner, I discovered the guy was a bit of a domain shark and didn’t seem to be around anymore.

So I placed a backorder through GoDaddy for .95 thinking that was all I needed to do. During the week that followed, I learned a lot about the domain expiration process. Two and a half months and 9 later, I am the proud owner of a shiny new domain. A really really good one.

This article will explain the domain expiration process and what you need to do in order to use it to your advantage.

How a domain expiresContrary to popular belief, domains do not expire when they say they do. If the owner of a domain does not renew by the expiration date of the domain, the domain goes into “expired” status. For 40 days, the domain is in a grace period where all services are shut off, but the domain owner may still renew the domain for a standard renewal fee. If a domain enters this period, it is a good first indicator that it may not be renewed, but since the owner can re-register without penalty, it can also just be a sign of laziness or procrastination.

After 40 days are up, the domain’s status changes to “redemption period”. During this phase, all WhoIs information begins disappearing, and more importantly, it now costs the owner an additional fee to re-activate and re-register the domain. The fee is currently around 0, depending on your registrar. When a domain enters its redemption period, it’s a good bet the owner has decided not to renew.

Finally, after the redemption period, the domain’s status will change to “locked” as it enters the deletion phase. The deletion phase is 5 days long, and on the last day between 11am and 2pm Pacific time, the name will officially drop from the ICANN database and will be available for registration by anybody.

The entire process ends exactly 75 days after the listed expiration date. For an even more detailed explanation, read the article Inside a Drop Catcher’s War Room.Landing your domain

So if domains are available to the general public 75 days after they expire, how do you know your GoDaddy backorder isn’t one of many other backorders from other people using other services? The answer is, you don’t.

And thus begins the cloak-and-dagger game of “getting in on The Drop”.

“The Drop” is the unpredictable three hour period of time in which the domain is deleted from VeriSign’s database and released back into the ecosystem.I briefly thought about trying to beat GoDaddy to the punch by manually registering my domain during the drop process, but I quickly found out that there are no fewer than three major services which specialize in pounding away on VeriSign’s servers during the drop period. With their considerable resources and my measly Powerbook, there was no way I could compete on their level.

So I decided to enlist the services of all three major domain snatching firms in hopes that a) one would grab my domain for me, and b) no one else would be competing against me.The three services — Snapnames.com, Enom.com, and Pool.com — all operate in a similar manner. They use a network of registrars to hit the Verisign servers at frequent intervals (but not too frequent to get banned) and snatch as many requested names as possible. If you don’t get your name, you don’t pay. But that’s where the three services begin to differ.Snapnames.com

Snapnames.com (the exclusive partner of Network Solutions) charges you for your domain unless there are multiple suitors, at which point there is an open bid auction between suitors. Seems fair enough. Snapnames is a bit of a newcomer to the game, but with their Network Solutions affiliation, they are said to be improving their success rates.Enom.comNot wanting to chance it with only one company, I also enlisted Enom to snatch my domain for me. Enom had reportedly been improving their “Club Drop” service for a year or two and it was now considered one of the top three. Their fee was only and they are based in my ‘hood (Seattle), so I was hoping they would be the company to successfully “work The Drop” for me.

Here’s where it starts to get sketchy though.

Enom claims that the higher your bid is (beyond the ), the more “resources” they will dedicate to grabbing the domain. What the hell? How am I supposed to judge that? Does that mean you’re using one server now and will use 30 servers if I bid ? Or does it mean that you’re using 30 now and will use 35 if I bid 00?

Not knowing exactly what to do, I attempted to bid a couple of hundred dollars during the last day, but Enom required me to send them a fax to become a “verified bidder”. Since I was at home that day and only dinosaurs still have fax machines, I was unable to increase my bid. Oh well, I thought, if someone else on Enom bids higher, at least I’ll be able to participate in the auction.Pool.com

Pool.com is the Scott Boras of domain name grabbing — the brilliant, yet conniving agent that players (domains) love and team owners (prospective domain buyers) hate. Pool plays off the power of the unknown in such a fiendishly clever way that you don’t know whether to hug them or kill them. Here’s how it works:

Pool is the #1 company around as far as number of servers and success rates go. You place your original bid for and if Pool.com grabs your name for you, they send you an e-mail telling you they’ve been successful and that you’ve now entered “Phase 1″ of the two-phase auction system. This is the case whether or not you are the only bidder! Pool.com doesn’t even reveal how many bidders there are.

Then, in a Boras-like move of diabolical genius, Pool.com informs you that you have three days to place a new sealed bid. If the bid is either one of the top two bids or within 30% of the top bid, you move on to a one-day open bid auction (the “challenger” auction) for final control of the domain.

Grrrrreat.

So if I bid 0 and two people bid 0, I don’t even get to move on to the final auction! It’s all designed to get me to up my sealed bid… whether or not there are even any other bidders.

Note: One other thing I forgot to mention is that before the name dropped, I grabbed all.net,.org, and.info variants (all were available) in order to have more leverage over other buyers.The chase is on

Right on time, 75 days after the domain expired, I got an e-mail from Pool.com telling me they’d secured my domain for me. Great. Of the four sources I used, Pool.com was the one I least wanted to deal with. But true to their claims, they ended up being the best agent of The Drop and had just gotten me one step closer to my domain. They had A-Rod and I was the Texas Rangers.

Unlike the Texas Rangers, however, I realized I could be bidding against myself and entered a sealed bid of 2. I chose that number because it seemed sufficiently high but not so high that I’d feel foolish if I was the only bidder. I added the extra two dollars on the end just to edge out any other people potentially deciding on 0 as their number.

The next three days were particularly stressful. I had no idea where I stood, and throughout this entire process, I’d always had the sneaking suspicion that the people at these companies are on the lookout themselves for valuable domains. In other words, if someone all of a sudden bids 00 on a domain, will a domain company decide to snatch it up themselves or “shill bid” against you on it?

Finally the e-mail from Pool arrived and informed me that I had moved onto the Challenger Auction. There was one other bidder and they had upped their bid to 2 in order to beat me. Not too bad, but I had no idea how high that person was willing to go. I had to decide on a top bid (a la eBay’s proxy bidding) and a strategy for when to place it.

True to form, Pool.com’s auction system squeezes even more money out of you by making sure the auction doesn’t end if there’s a bid in the last five minutes. In that case, the auction time keeps extending by five minutes until there are no more bids.

I could try one of two things: Bid high and bid early in an attempt to scare off the other guy, or lull the other guy to sleep by doing nothing until the last 6 minutes. I chose the second method since the ending time was 8am on a Saturday… a time when many people are not in front of computers. I set four alarms for 7:45am Saturday morning, woke up on time, and placed my bid for 0 when the countdown clock hit 6 minutes.

The system immediately auto-upped the current bid to 9 and I was the leader. Six nervous minutes, fifty browser refreshes, and a thousand heartbeats later, my opponent was nowhere to be found and the domain was mine… ready for immediate transfer to Dreamhost, my hosting company of choice.

I’m still not quite sure whether the person on the other end was real (although I assume they were), but the bottom line is that by playing every possible angle, I now have an extremely valuable domain in my possession for the reasonable sum of 9. Not valuable because I want to sell it or anything; just valuable because I want it.

For more articles Please visit All Web Hosts.

About the Author

I am Arpit,the webmaster of the site All Web Hosts is a computer enginner and enjoys working in front of computers. I like to spend my time in building sites and on various forums. AllWebHosts site is mainatined by me and one of my friend, Prashant. In my free time, I like to play table-tennis.

More How To Bid On Expired Domain Names Articles

10 Steps To Adult Web Site Business Profitability

I thought to write this because of the hundreds of calls I receive at AWT every week regarding horror stories of prospective webmasters spending thousands of dollars to Start A Money Making Website Adult Business. The reason their calling me is for me to somehow perform a miracle making them money after they spent thousands of dollars on an Adult Turnkey Website Business that will never make money. Basically they fell victim to ridiculous financial promises that were very unrealistic and could never occur in a million years. This is the typical garbage that some Turnkey Adult Website Companies spit out to make it sound as if it is so easy to make a million dollars overnight in this industry. The good news is there is good money to be made in the Adult Turnkey Website Business but you need to partner with the correct people that are knowledgeable and resourceful.

10 Steps That Are Most Important In Starting An Adult Website Business Empire

I know this from firsthand experience. I am not some writer who is writing about the Adult Website Design market; I am an Adult Website Company owner writing about the best way to make money by owning your own Website Adult Business.

Niche Markets – Don’t target the typical blonde haired blue eyed girls – no mega sites that have 10 different types of content or Adult Website Design Companies that claim that their websites have just shemales when they actually have all types of content in the members section. People are passionate about their own niche market they enjoy. They get pissed when they see other types of content in the members section of the so called niche specific Adult Turnkey Websites.

Keep the Adult Website simplified – Easy navigation. Don’t have clutter on your website or too much happening or moving at once on the website for it turns prospective business off. Adult Turnkey Websites such as this are horrible to the eye and turn people off. There are many studies that show this and they all can’t be lying.

Your Adult Website Business must have High Definition content or as close to HD as possible. HD = more sign ups. You must also have at least 5 teaser high definition quality video clips to increase conversion to full sign ups. Most companies offer nothing on their Adult Websites and this is a huge mistake.

You must use Affiliate Website Programs that bring in extra revenue for your website. Make them as niche specific as possible. We like to use scam free affiliate programs such as cams, personals, toys, video on demand. There are too many to mention but I think you get the point. Again our goal is to make these affiliate website programs as niche specific as possible to match the niche theme of the entire Adult Web Site Business.

Marketing – Do your homework and research, research and research. Don’t depend on a marketing company to do all this work for you. The Adult Website is yours not theirs so please get educated in the field. You need to take responsibility for the marketing of your own website. Don’t ever think that the marketing company that you hire is going to be able to perform all the marketing on its own. If you owned any other business; I am sure you would get very involved in it. If you want to make money with your Adult Web Site Business you need to treat this as any other type of business.

Low Cost Low Risk – Adult Website Businesses should not cost what most adult design companies charge. Most of you are new to the business so why jump into some foreign business, spending all your money upfront? Owning your own adult web site business is not gambling; it is long-term business. You have to keep your start up costs low or you will fail miserably. Watch out for hidden costs, such as hosting that adds up quickly. One thing people don’t consider is how easy it is for a Website Design Company to increase your hosting fee after only a few months in business. Some charge – 0 a month per site for hosting when you purchase your website and then about 3 or 4 months later tell you that you are using too much bandwidth and double your hosting fee. The first year in business has to come with FREE hosting or I would stay away from the web design company. Keep your money for smart marketing. This is an efficient way to use your money. Do your homework on this long-term business endeavor so you don’t waste your hard earned marketing money.

Watch Out For Sharks – If you take the bait they will pounce on you with horrible Website Adult Design and extremely high prices. When companies make claims such as “As Seen On TV” or as being a member of the chamber of commerce you need to run like hell. This is the adult website business and you don’t get on television for owning one. Also, All you have to do to be listed with the Chamber of Commerce is to have a business and pay the dues. Also, don’t buy into these crazy Testimonials about how the guy has saved their marriage and family. WOW!!! Watch Profit Charts. ,000 profit in your 4th month in the adult web site business from 1 site?? So if I purchase 100 sites from the design companies that claim this I will be making 0,000.00 in my 4th month in business?? At this rate I would make more than 5 Million dollars in my 1st year in business!!! PEOPLE ACTUALLY FALL FOR THESE PROMISES. DON’T BE A VICTIM!! GET EDUCATED!! GET EMPOWERED!! Check out the watchdog agencies for the industry such as scam.com, ripoffreport.com. Also go to google and type in the owner of the businesses name, the business name. Also type in the owner’s name with scam or ripoff after the name. For Example: Jones scam or Teletar SCAM. These are just phrases that come to mind at the moment not actual companies. It is your hard earned money. Don’t waste it.

Partner with Internet content companies. Don’t buy an Adult Website Business that comes with content that you supposedly own. You are getting shitty content. You want good High Definition quality content by partnering with content companies. I can send you a list of them if you desire. Just hit me up on email. The majority of our competition uses live feeds as content. This is megasite content which is not what the average person is looking for. Point is if you don’t partner with the content companies you will have to become one to compete and that is very expensive.

Updates of Content – Partnering with content companies will assure you that your content will be updated often. With our Adult Website Design Business this is what we do. We and the content companies have a vested interest in you making money. We make more money when we assist you in making more. If content companies and design companies do not have a vested interest in you making money why would they update the content for you?? The answer is simple for they wouldn’t and so they don’t. Do you know how expensive updating content is? If I was not making money by updating your content why would I waste my time doing it? I wouldn’t. If you purchase an Adult Website Business with content the Adult Design Company manages you will not get your content updated for you. The content will be old and will only get older because the design company has no interest in updating it. When you partner with content companies the content company only makes money by updating your content. This partnering with content companies is our website design business model and as far as we know it is the only model that works. We would not steer you in the wrong direction.

Don’t bet the farm on one Adult Website Business. This is an investment in your future; not a job. You are investing your hard earned money. If you were to invest in the stock market it is better to invest in mutual funds than it is to invest in one stock and bet the farm on it. That stock comes with tremendous risk whereas the mutual fund tremendously reduces that risk. The point here is don’t invest your hard earned money in one revenue stream when you can invest it in possibly 10. We do just that for all clients and the others should also otherwise they are just setting you up to fail miserably.

Just like in any other business, Keep costs and risk low. Get into niche specific markets with your adult website business. Don’t be foolish and take on high risk and waste all your hard earned money believing ridiculous claims of tremendous wealth. There is very good money to be made in this Adult Website Business Industry but only when you do your homework and partner with knowledgeable business people in the field. In the Adult Turnkey Website Business as in any other business you need to diversify your portfolio for risk and maximum return on investment. Profit with your own Adult Website Business when you do your research on the industry and realize that real business takes time. Good Luck and Be Careful!! Some sharks are in the water in every industry.