Domain Name Renewal Qn
 

How long after a .co.uk domain name (owned by someone else) expires does it become available to purchase by the general public. I seem to recall it being 60 days?

The WhoIs is says "Registration Status: Renewal required."

Re: Domain Name Renewal Qn
 

I thought it was around 90 days, at which point it then deletes at (essentially) a random time.

However if it's a 'good' name, you have very little chance of grabbing it before one of the automated systems gets it, or the registrar themselves grabs it

After renewal required, it should then go to a pending delete status

Re: Domain Name Renewal Qn
 

it's actually a bit more than you'd think.. (.co.uk anyway)

nominet (the .uk registrar) invoice you 7 days after expiry, and suspend the domain 30 days after that for a further 60 days..

http://www.nominet.org.uk/MakingChan...nName/Renewal/

basically, from expiry date to availability could take up to 97 days.

Re: Domain Name Renewal Qn
 

Automated systems? DN sniping? How, where, who?

Thanks, I was thinking of the detagged status of 60 days.

Diary note for 90 days time then.

Re: Domain Name Renewal Qn
 

A lot of places allow you to 'backorder' a name - to use their automated system to grab the name - it may be different for .co.uk names - it's really only .coms that I have looked at over time - places like www.clubdrop.com, www.pool.com deal with auctioning dropped names.

Just had a look through some of my stuff and http://www.dropcatcher.co.uk/ deals with .co.uks

pool.com also deals with .co.uk's - but be prepared to pay big time if it's a good name. often these things go into closed auctions if enough people want it

Re: Domain Name Renewal Qn
 

Incidentally, if anyone is looking at possibly making some money in the future - it may be worth investing a bit of money in the new .sc domain names - registration costs about 30 quid a year (sadly I don't sell them, so I'm not even plugging for new business :) ) - because the costs are quite high, there still seems to be a lot of 'good' domain names going - i.e. single word, brandable domain names - hopefully once they pick up in popularity they should be worth a fair bit - sex.sc is alread being auctioned on sedo - and has a fair few bids : http://www.sedo.de/search/details.ph...artnerid=13623

There's no cast iron promise that they will go up in value, but you never know...

Re: Domain Name Renewal Qn
 

I wrote a script to monitor the output from the nominet whois record using Lynx (a dos command line browser) onto http://195.66.240.211/cgi-bin/whois....bleforum.co.uk

I then searched for certain phrases in the text and then got it to send an email (all command line) to my works email address which I created a rule on to forward the message to my mobile.

I ran this every 30 minutes (frequency of page changes at nominet)

good luck!

Re: Domain Name Renewal Qn
 

I've got some java classes that deal with automated whois lookups for domain names (I've been using them to check for the existance of all 3 and 4 letter domains) - would be very easy to change it so that it just looks for one domain name and polls frequently.... if anyone is interested, or wants them