Hello everyone, need help real quick please...

I want to register a domain name which will be expiring really really soon. I found Snapnames.com from this forum and some people said they had successes in them...

Does everyone know how they work? I mean... the charges are $69 for every domain. What happens if the domain I wanted to 'snap' wasn't 'snapped' successfully? As in the current owner holds it... and then on the last minute before it expires he/she renews it... does everyone know what happens to my $69? Do I lose it? Or is it still a credit for me to 'snap' other domains?

The domain name is going to expire in 6 days... please please please everyone who knows about snapnames help me out...

Or if there're better methods of 'snapping' it if anyone knows how to, could you please post it as well. (kinda confused about snapname... so if it's alright could someone explain it in detail?)

Thanks everyone!

They answer your question clearly in their Support area FAQs.

The short answer is your $69 is good for a year's service attempting to snap dropping names. You can move it from one expired domain to another, no problem.

If after a year you have not been lucky enough to get a domain, your $69 is gone.

-t

Do you know how successful they are at what they do? With that one $69 can you back-order two domains at the same time?(so let's say one didn't work.... but the other did...?)

They have as good a chance as any other dropped name service.

If you want to have multiple active SnapBack's they will cost you $69 each.

-t

which are the other ones?
which one would you say is the best? best as in most sucessful... pricing... everything..

I was looking at expirefish.com and snapnames.com and it seems snapnames seem to do it better than expirefish... snapnames claims that they are able to do it in the miliseconds while expirefish saids they'll register it as soon as it's possible (no mention of time). Does anyone know which is better between the two?

in my opinion, snapnames is without a doubt, the better of those two services.

Originally posted by hostjet
in my opinion, snapnames is without a doubt, the better of those two services.
Curious why you think this? I've not seen any data that supports one over the other as far as success of grabbed names goes. Do you have experience that shows something different?

-t

If I remember correctly ExpireFish checks monitored domains every 10 minutes, I used ExpireFish once, never really had too much luck on the better names..

Snapnames beats them ALL as it is run with Verisign (which runs the internet domain names). I dont think Snapnames can be unsuccessful.

IF the domain expires, snapnames WILL get it for you.

Originally posted by Magic
Snapnames beats them ALL as it is run with Verisign (which runs the internet domain names). I dont think Snapnames can be unsuccessful.

IF the domain expires, snapnames WILL get it for you.
Nonsense.

-t

Originally posted by thewitt

Nonsense.

-t

Excuse me??? Would you like to elaborate on your extremely detailed insult?

LOL! :D :D Sorry just had to burst out laughing


I heard my friend who is really into this domain thing, and he said he beat out snapnames a few times on huge drops by NS on occasion.

How does he do that!?

I've not seen any data that supports one over the other as far as success of grabbed names goes. Do you have experience that shows something different?

Thewitt, have you used either service?
I have tracked names on many an occasion. I always look at who gets the names that I am after and the data points to snapnames being pretty good at what they do. expirefish does not even come close. It is always changing, companies evolve different techniques etc and who is king of the domain name expiring market one day may not be the next. IAREgistry used to be one of the top players, not any more.

I have also used namewinner and snapnames on the same name and snapnames wins out.
Of course snapnames are far from being a successful gurantee of securing an expired domain name, there are people out there who must have links or deals with some of the smaller registrars who repeatedly beat snapnames every time for the very top names.

But I dont think you will find any data to dispute my claim that snapnames is better than expirefish, if you do, please let me know.

hostjet, do you know any of those 'smaller registrars'? Would really appreciate it.

omni, you have to keep in mind that it is no secret that a lot of these registars charge between hundreds and thousands for the right to use special scripts during the drop times. enom charges like $2500 a month for their club drop.

those people who know how to beat the professionals like snapnames, namewinner, expirefish etc are not about to share their secrets with any of us, and understandably so.

An example of a recent name which I saw which beat out snapnames was obtained by onlinenic.com which is based in china. But the registrant was also in china, so who is to say what sort of special arrangement there was there.

omni, I am no professional in obtaining expired names, so unfortunately I can not offer you any better advice than to give snapnames a go. And I even have my doubts with them, who knows what will become of them if the WLS is introduced? will the snapbacks be transferred to the new service, will we get a refund? who knows for sure!

Id like to point out this article: http://www.ecommercebase.com/article/640

with particular attention to the following section:
Verisign, on the other hand, control the .com registry, so they don't have to rely on luck, judgment, or even technical prowess. By making adjustments to the registry protocols, they can guarantee that any deleted domain name is redistributed to a party subscribed to their WLS (Waiting List Service). This turns what was once a very useful service into an absolute killer.

It should be no surprise to learn that Verisign have actually teamed up with SnapNames to produce this waiting list service, and licensed SnapNames' Parallel Registry™ technology in the process.

Having said that, there may be exceptional occasions where the registrar makes some sort of deal to allow their customers to get expired domains, as mentioned by hostjet.

Thanks hostjet and Magic. Guess will just have to give it a go.

Have another question though... I typed in the domain name onto internet explorer and this page (attachment) came up several times ... (with exception of the domain name) Does anyone know why? It's redirected to a similar site over and over... is it some sort of auction site or 'marketplace' site?

Thanks everyone for your help and advice.

omni, who is the domain registrar?
if the domain name just expires in 6 days, it could be ages before it is actually deleted and available for registration. especially if the domain name is registered via network solutions.

It is also quite common for names that expire to actually be renewed by the registrant after the expiry date, in some cases long after the expiry registration date is over. I have seen that happen quite a number of times.

Sorry I went over to Snapnames to do a whois. They're at opensrs.org and bulkregister.com. Does anyone know how long the grace period is? Hostjet? Thanks everyone really appreciate it...

The comment that SnapNames is in cahoots with Versign so that they will get all dropped names is nonesense. Sorry Magic - I have you on my ignore list from some time ago and I made the mistake of reading one of your posts and responding. It was silly of me to do so. My mistake.

As for using these services, I am an outside, interested observer. I don't personally speculate in domains, though I have customers to do.

I do have a listing here somewhere of the success of these services that we put together while arguing against the Verisign WLS services (maybe magic this is the relationship with SnapNames you were thinking about). It showed that by volume of requests, the success rates for these services were about equal. It also showed that standard, manual registrations at "drop time" were as likely to get the interesting domain - there was no guarantee that the automated service would even pick it up.

One of the things to keep in mind is that the registry uses rate limiting on all of these services. They are not permitted to flood the registry with requests and are throttled back equally by design. This was in response to the registry flooding that used to occur when these services first started out. Versign claims to have fixed this flooding in their current systems - though it is still pushing for the WLS service - which will give them a $70M a year monopoly on dropping names...

In theory, if SnapNames is trying to pick up 100,000 names, and ExpireFish is trying to pick up 20,000 domains at the same time, ExpireFish may actually be more likely to get the domain, since SnapNames will only have gone through 1/5th of it's list when ExpireFish is completely done processing it's requests.

I have customers who use all 10-12 of the services out there when they are really hot on a particular domain. They report about equal success, so I'm not prejudiced towards one service or another.

If you have real data that shows otherwise, I'd love to see it. We are still arguing that this open, competitive system is much better than the WLS that Verisign is proposing, and if the data shows that one system is at an advantage today, that would be interesting to know. I just have never seen the data - only statements like the ones on this thread that claim one is better than the other.

No offense meant, just looking for facts in place of opinion.

-t

omni, the opensrs one should drop 45 days after the expiration date and i dont know about bulkregister.com. but you may get lucky with that one, i have seen bulkregister.com drop names six days after the expiration date while the domain still resolves to the website.

mind you there is a chance that the registrant will renew, so I would not get your hopes too high.

thewitt,

my statement was that snapnames was better than expirefish.

I dont know about snapnames process 24 hours a day, but I can assure you that during drop times they do check the desired name every second or fraction of a second.

Now for a little extract from the expirefish site

Our system is 100% automated, every 10 minutes we verify the status of a desired name. When that name becomes available we immediately register it for you on your behalf.

Now even I could beat a service which checks every ten minutes for a domain name. I also have read a post where someone complained about expire fish not picking up a domain name more than 10 minutes after it dropped. So common sense would have to indicate that snapnames would be better than a service checking every ten minutes.


It showed that by volume of requests, the success rates for these services were about equal. It also showed that standard, manual registrations at "drop time" were as likely to get the interesting domain

Not disputing this data, but I dont think it would take into consideration the quality of the domain name, which is a very important consideration.



In theory, if SnapNames is trying to pick up 100,000 names, and ExpireFish is trying to pick up 20,000 domains at the same time, ExpireFish may actually be more likely to get the domain, since SnapNames will only have gone through 1/5th of it's list when ExpireFish is completely done processing it's requests.

the witt, dont mean to be harsh, but this is really flawed logic.
By your reasoning, I should be able to beat both of these services if I am only going after one name. This statement makes absolutely NO allowance for the number of computers they have running, the number of fast connections they have, the quality of the automated scripts that they are using, any special arrangements they have with the domain registrars, etc

Originally posted by hostjet
[clip]the witt, dont mean to be harsh, but this is really flawed logic.
By your reasoning, I should be able to beat both of these services if I am only going after one name. This statement makes absolutely NO allowance for the number of computers they have running, the number of fast connections they have, the quality of the automated scripts that they are using, any special arrangements they have with the domain registrars, etc
Actually, the number of computers does not matter. Perhaps you missed the statement that Verisign has now rate limited the connections from registrars like SnapNames and ExpireFish, and they can no longer simply throw a huge number of computers at the problem and flood them with requests. It's not like these guys are coming in anonymously. Their connections with the registry are registered, authenticated, and well known systems.

The exact mechanism that Verisign has deployed to rate limit drop-catching is not public information, but drops occur once a day at a predetermined time (so checking at off hours is not even interesting), and yes, you can catch hot domains manually by registering them at any realtime domain registrar. It's happens all the time - where an individual beats out all the dropped name services.

All of this is very interesting, and has been discussed to death in and around the proposed WLS system, but I don't believe that SnapNames "owns" this market, and unless Verisign is granted full control of the dropped names market with their WLS proposal, it will continue to stay competitive, and even the little guy will stand a chance to simply grab a dropping domain without having to pay anyone outrageous fees to do so.

If you want to experiment, put a couple of hundred duplicate dropped name requests in with the various dropped name services and let's analyze the results. One or two is not a valid sample site - it needs to be statistically interesting.

It would be facinating to see if any one of the services comes out on top. Until we have this impirical data however, it's all speculation, and whether or not you believe the advertising hype at any particular dropped name service.

I know for a fact that ExpireFish and eNom both pick up dropping names, and indeed names that have SnapNames reservations on them are regularly lost to these other services. Is there a clear winner? I'm not in a position to say.

-t

Thanks hostjet and thewitt for your reply. Best that could be done is to give Snapnames a go...

Have you guys seen the attachment yet? (domainname.gif) Any clues about it?

Perhaps you missed the statement that Verisign has now rate limited the connections from registrars like SnapNames and ExpireFish,

thewitt, I may be wrong, but I think you are totally incorrect in calling snapnames and expirefish registrars. To my knowledge they are just expired name services that utilise the services and connections of the ICANN accredited registrars.

Verisign limits the connections of registrars (not snapnames and expirefish), so if snapnames has agreements to use the connections of 7 accredited registrars, as opposed to expirefish which I believes just uses enom, then perhaps their chances may be increased.

I dont believe that snapnames is a great unbeatable service, but for people who are not specialists, they are definitely worth trying, if you are after an expired name.



but drops occur once a day at a predetermined time (so checking at off hours is not even interesting),

again, this statement is made by someone who by their own admission does not personally speculate in domains, the supposed window of time when they are meant to drop sometimes varies, in fact this is the time when I have managed to get a few decent nanes.

I don't believe that SnapNames "owns" this market
I agree 100%, and any of my comments were just based on my personal observations.

I don't know anything about that specific site whos image you posted, however it looks to me like a parking page that collects email addresses.

When a domain speculator has purchased a domain name that they don't plan on doing anything with, many will park them somewhere.

These parking services sometimes put up banner ads to try and generate revenue, or can simply track hits to the page to see if the domain without any site on it is popular (if there was not website at sex.com, how many hits would it get?)

Many will put up "this domain for sale" pages, or direct you to an auction or classifeds site.

This one looks like it's just collecting email addresses. I wouldn't sign up if I were you :).

-t

I have used expirefish, snapnames and namewinner. I have grabbed nearly 30 names using expirefish.com

namewinner - 0
snapnames - 2

I do not buy into nonsense the snapnames is the best, get real

elleW, so you're saying that expirefish is better than the other two? (or do you agree with thewitt more that they stand an equal chance?)

those are very interesting stats ellew
May i ask, of the 30 domain names that you grabbed using expirefish.com, did you also have a snapback with snapnames on the same name?

All I know is that I've been waiting for a domain that expired 3 1/2 months ago. :(

Verisign is the registrar and they simply won't release it. I've often wondered that if I paid the $69.00 extortion... *excuse me* "backorder fee" for the snapback service if the domain would then suddenly become available.

If someone hasn't renewed in three months... hey, there's little chance that they care about the domain anymore.

Just my 2 centavos...

paying the $69 snapback fee wont result in the name being dropped any faster, about the only thing that may possible result in network solutions names being dropped faster is the introduction of the WLS, and even that is questionable.

You can bet that NetSols name dropping practices will be highly scrutinized when and if the WLS is approved - however even that scrutiny may not change their behavior to lean more towards open and honest busness practices...

-t

One of the names that I was "seeking" I had initially signed up via Snapnames (this was via a "back order" link on a domain registration site). I paid the hefty price (69.00) and business went on. I happened upon a forum and noticed that Expirefish was an advertising sponsor so I said what the heck and spent the 9.99 per month.

Expirefish gives you the ability to add multiple names, so I added over a 100 names, some really good some so-so. I even added the same name I am monitoring on Snapnames.

I added funds to my Quick checkout account so I would be able to register names when they became available. Within a 60 day period I had grabbed over 30 names (some really good, and yes the name I paid Snapnames $69.00 bucks for).

Without reading into the hype I see around snapnames, I am very impressed with the expirefish service so far.

i decided to put snapnames/namewinner/expirefish against one another for one domain name, guess who won?

none of them, it was snapped up by an independent who is actually very famous for getting all the best expired names.
The domain name did not even go on hold or anything like that, just there one day and transferred the next. In fact it still resolved to the old site while the new persons details appeared on the whois.

Hi hostjet

none of them, it was snapped up by an independent who is actually very famous for getting all the best expired names.

Could you possibly reveal the identity of this "independent" and the particular domain name he/she managed to register, so that we can learn from the episode?

Thanks.
sas386