Taking over expiring domains - part 2

Earlier I wrote about an interesting article regarding takeover of expiring domains. Recently I had a first-hand experience myself:

For about two years we run the website www.firebirdfaq.org. It has become pretty successful if you consider the niche market it covers, that being the users of Firebird DBMS. Ever since the start in 2007. I wanted to somehow get a hold of the .com variant of the domain. Just to make sure that people who mistype the URL come to the right place. At the time it was owned by someone in Germany, and they did not seem to use it much (no website, only e-mail apparently). In fact, it was to expire in August 2007, so I spent $19.99 or something like that on GoDaddy to grab it. To my misfortune, the owner extended the registration, and I canceled monitoring on GoDaddy. I completely forgot about it until a few weeks ago.

August 2009. came and domain registration was not extended. I was completely unaware of this, but I got an e-mail from initrustbestdomains.org saying that domain is soon to be deleted and enter the market. They offered my to send a bid for the domain. My guess was that these guys already have a pick on it, so I don’t stand much chance if I go alone. I even considered placing an offer for $30, but I though that was a bit too low. So I decided to do give up on it.

And here it gets interesting:

At the moment when domain was deleted and returned to the “pool” I got this e-mail:

We are selling the domain name firebirdfaq.com. Since you own firebirdfaq.org if you would also like the more desirable .com we are making it available. The one time cost is $99.97. That includes a year of registration and transfer of ownership to you. To purchase or to learn more go to:

hxxp://www.buyyourdotcom.com/check…etc.

If you pass on this opportunity someone else could purchase this domain and it may not be available again.

Cool? Not!

Instead of giving them a hundred, I went to GoDaddy and registered the domain for $9.99. ;)

Of course, all this was a little bit of gambling on my side and I could have lost the domain, but it wasn’t that much important to me. YMMW.

Tweet to @mbabuskov Milan Babuškov, 2009-09-24