I was hoping someone out there has already tried this or can give me any insight/advice at all. So far, my lack of an extra $80K prevents me from signing myself up as a certified Registrar through ICANN, so my next best bet is to go with WildWestDomains or eNom and use their API interfaces to send registration requests systematically.
The problem is that I'm not sure a) if WWD or eNom will take kindly to a barrage of registration requests from a reseller, b) if they shut out resellers at the golden moment anyway to try and get names themselves for a 25% cut from pool.com or whatever, c) if the drop time(sweet spot?) really is between 2:00pm-2:15pm Eastern.
Anyway, if anyone knows anything about the difficulties involved with deleted domain catching, I would appreciate any info. I have a fair amount of technical skill (I'm employed as a software development engineer at MS), but I'd like to find out any major blocks before I spend a large amount of time writing the software to do it.
Basically, I'm assuming that this is still feasible for the little guy (like it was 2-3 years ago). Am I correct or just dreaming? Is my best bet to stick with namewinner and pool and bite the bullet when it comes to $3000 domains (or $40,000 -- anyone seen the auction for 640.com lately? insane!)?
Thanks in advance!
That is generally $5k-$30k/mo to sign on a registrar, and generally about $20k-$80k in programming.
API is way to slow in most cases to catch names.
Enom is amoung the slowest APIs.
By the time you cend the check command, the domain is gone.
They last less than 1/1000th of a second generally (for good names).
Enom will allow like 20 checks per minute on a domain.
Thanks for the advice about eNom though, they just sent me their reseller info and between what you said about them and their crappy deals, I don't think I'll be going with them anytime soon.
Anybody have any experience with Wild West Domains API though? They are still a possibility, but if they also limit the number of attempts to something horribly low like 20/minute, I think I'd have to pass.
Thanks for the help,
James
After all, even the big boys like NameWinner and SnapNames nearly always lose out to the heavy guns Pool brings to bear on the juiciest drops... so there's practically no chance of beating them as an "outsider" giving that you're competing will well-capitalized companies whose sole business is chasing dropping domains.
GoDaddy/WWD have their own in-house drop-catching service as well, by the way, so I would be amazed if their API would beat their internal system.
