posted
According to the whois records, a domain I want is expiring shortly. It's not likely to be under heavy competition and the current owner hasn't had anything on the site for at least eighteen months - it just shows an empty directory listing.
What's the deal with snagging the domain if the current owner doesn't renew his registration on the day it expires?
Does it become instantly available at midnight the day it'supposed to expire?
Can I trust any of these mobs that deal in about-to-expire domains?
Posts: 2245 | Registered: Nov 1998
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posted
As a courtesy (or marketing ploy) to the old owner, some registry companies reserve the expired domain for the old owner for a period of time. I don't know if this is standard industry practice though.
I have never used a back ordering service for domains, but godaddy's offer seems pretty decent:
quote:If you "backorder" this name, we will ATTEMPT to grab it and to register it on your behalf, if and when it expires and once again becomes available.
The low $18.95 backorder cost includes the registration fee, ICANN Fee, plus automatic monitoring and email alerts on changes to the Registrar, Status, Expiration Date, and Name Servers. Your domain backorder fee can be re-assigned to other names as often as you like, until you are successful in acquiring a domain name.
posted
This is semi-related: How does the whole 'domain registering' thing work, anyway? Who initially has the rights to all these domains? What's to stop me from finding one that isn't taken and hosting something on it myself?
I am lost with this stuff.
Posts: 5462 | Registered: Apr 2005
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posted
Under each Top Level Domain (TLD), such as com, net, org, and others, there is a registrar authorized to make decisions regarding that name. These registrars are all authorized agents of ICANN: http://www.icann.org/ , the overseeing organization. Beneath each of these primary registrars are many smaller registrars, which buy names in bulk from the primary registrar and typically bundle them with various services.
When you buy a domain name, that gets you the "right" to broadcast DNS (domain name server) information for it. You set up your DNS servers (usually two, and usually provided by your host or your registrar), and put in the information for your domain name and the publicly unique IP address of the server your site is on. Whenever anyone wants to visit your site by domain name, they rely on a query to these servers (typically one cached by their ISP's DNS servers), which tells them the IP address to use, which lets them communicate with your web server.
The nature of this right comes in the form of those nameservers being listed in your WHOIS information -- maintained by your registrar (or a registrar they bought from).
Now, in order for the DNS system to work, your DNS needs to propagate among the name servers, becoming cached and known about. The WHOIS system is how the TLD DNS servers know which DNS servers to talk to for which domain.
Now, technically you could add information to just about any domain to a DNS server not authorized to speak for that domain, and have it pass it on at incorrect times, "poisoning" the caches of DNS servers that query that DNS server (mainly ISP's DNS), but this can be pretty hard to do, isn't terribly effective, and can be caught fairly easily.
However, you can tell your computer to use any DNS server you might want. This could be a DNS server that returns responses for ICANN names which are different from the normal ones, so hatrack.com might take you to the FBIs website (to be random), or much more commonly you could point to a DNS server which serves additional domain names that ICANN does not have authority over (ones without ICANN TLDs). These are called alternate DNS roots, and there are several of them around: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_DNS_rootPosts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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