Case of the missing domain name!
Hmm, well i’m back on the case - sorta.
Well before I get to a plan, i’ve got a little story to tell. Most likely i’ll have only one or two people reading this, but that’s ok. It’s a way for me to put down my thoughts related to my work, so I no longer have to think about them. I get motivation from telling people what i’m doing, kind of bizzare but that’s what does it for me. Anyway onto the story.
I finally got my domain name gamesafoot.com - let me tell you how I managed to get it. I used godaddy.com to register games-afoot.com, games-afoot-software.com, and gamesafootsoftware.com, and did that almost 2 years ago (Feb of 2004). I decided to use godaddy’s “Domain Alert Pro” domain name backordering service. Which means it will try to capture and register a domain name for you that is currently owned by someone else when the domain comes up for deletion. 19 bucks (USD) to attempt (keep that word in mind attempt) to capture the elusive gamesafoot.com. It was registered to some person in some state is of no consequence. Of course godaddy said that it would attempt and might not be successful. I assumed that if someone else had done it, a single person or game company, then I probably wouldn’t get it. It was a chance I was willing to take. So here we are December of 2005 and by all luck it happens to be pending for deletion, and then I get an email stating that godaddy will attempt to capture it. So i’m cool with that, and it says “capture failed”. And I’m like shoot 19 bucks for nothing. So when I do some checking as to who got it, it was some company named some such thing, that appearently were buying dropped domain names. This wasn’t a person or game company, this was just an appearant reseller. Which by the way when I went to this company’s website it only had a whois form and an email address. This annoyed me to some extent, so I contacted godaddy about it. Well it turns out that sometimes the domain name does not get released at all, which means I would have no chance of getting it. I mean I understood someone could get it before me, but I didn’t expect it to not even be released. Now I was a bit more annoyed than I was before. I asked them if I could get my money back. Of course I couldn’t but I could “transfer to another domain as many times as needed to get the domain I wanted”. But there was only one I wanted. So then the only thing left to do was to contact this other “company”. I emailed them saying I wanted it. Of course nothing happened for a few days and then on January 2nd 2006, I get an automated email from godaddy saying they had successfully captured it. So the moral of this story is be proactive and you will get results. Actually I don’t know if the emails had anything to do with it, since it was automated. It may be just the fact that I said I wanted my money back and godaddy didn’t want bad publicity. It may be that this other company was not setup right away to handle anything so they released the domain, or it could be any other number of reasons. So the moral of the story might be, godaddy’s domain alert pro might be somewhat of a risk. So if you happen to purchase this service and the domain you want doesn’t get released, don’t say I never told you so.
Keith