Posted on Thursday, January 08th (5584 days ago)

I just had to take a moment to complain…  What a sleazy business. Its kinda like buying foreclosed homes. There has to be some bad karma associated with purchasing recently expired domain names and trying to resell them for profit. 

Ok, I can’t complain about selling domain names for profit. I do it all the time.  Part of my business model is the purchasing of domain names and hosting on the behaf of my clients. And marking it up a little bit for my time.

That’s business.  On the other hand, having a domain name registration company alert you the minute a domain name expires so you can immediately pick it up and then ask for a couple hundred (thats the going minimum) bucks from the person who forgot about it? 

Example: Long ago I wanted to have joetaylor.com.

Another Joe Taylor (an elderly gentleman from the midwest) used the domain name for his family photo and news page.

Years later I checked to see if the name had ever become available. It had, but someone else had registered it.

A DJ from Canada… I asked him how much and he said “$10,000”. No thanks. Okay, I suppose on a level that’s fairly logical as his name is Joe Taylor too etc… 
 

A better example: Ted P*&%o was a real estate agent for many years and used tedp*&%o.com for his website. He thought he was finally going to retire and build his log cabin in the woods so he turned off his real estate site and let the name expire this past fall.  You wouldn’t think people would be jumping on tedp*&%o.com. Its an uncommon name at best, doesn’t contain and juicy keywords etc…wrong. 

The only needed criteria for a company to pick up an expired name at this point is history. Has anyone ever visited the site? If so its as good as gone since they can put adds on it etc, taking your hard work and using it to their profit. Yes, its shitty.  More importantly, its a warning.

If you even care a little about your registered domain names, hang onto them!

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About Joseph R. B. Taylor

Joseph R. B. Taylor is a humble designer/developer who makes stuff for screens of all shapes and sizes. He is currently the lead UI/UX Architect at MScience, LLC, where he works to create simple experiences on top of large rich datasets for their customers and clients.