Has anyone dealt with dotregistrar.com? The reason I ask is I have a bit of a problem.

I have been trying to secure weinbar.com for the last year and it came up for renewal in February. THe person who registered it first never used the domain and let it lapse. I have been checking the whois ever since and dotster (where it was registered) had removed it from their database, but I was never able to register it. It kept saying that the domain is not available.

Well, today, after the whois update, I checked again and it had been assigned to dotregister.com, yet there is no registrant information:

Whois Server Version 1.3

Domain names in the .com, .net, and .org domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.

Domain Name: WEINBAR.COM
Registrar: IHOLDINGS.COM, INC. D/B/A DOTREGISTRAR.COM
Whois Server: whois.dotregistrar.com
Referral URL: http://www.dotregistrar.com
Name Server: No nameserver
Updated Date: 04-mar-2001


>>> Last update of whois database: Mon, 5 Mar 2001 07:48:39 EST <<<

The Registry database contains ONLY .COM, .NET, .ORG, .EDU domains and
Registrars.

I cannot for the life of me figure out what happened.

Does dotregistrar.com buy up expired domain names and hold them? Any help would be appreciated.

I have been registering with dotregistrar.com for some time now,

THough they directly do not register lost or dropped domain names, they do collect the list (huge ) of domain names that are being dropped and mail them to their members so that they can inturn register them . Their list is often as huge as having over 20000 domain names, cannot believe 4 character domain names are still available.

one other thing even i have noticed is their complete whois only appears on their own site and not when checked from other sites like register.com

There is otherwise no problem with their domain registrations.

Regards
Manish Kapadia
Bombay-India