Perhaps I could rephrase the question. Is there any way a normal person can beat snapnames? Are those of us limited to what you call "public grabbing" doomed to loose to snapnames? Are there other resources we can access?
teeceo
Snapnames will only allow one person to backorder a name. I went there do back order a name and found that someone else had done so, which prompted my question to this forum.
[edited by: umbria at 5:20 pm (utc) on July 23, 2002]
For .com, .net and .org
http://www.snapnames.com (as mentioned)
currently claims to have about an 80% success rate. have used them myself and they are pretty good unless your after a 3 letter or one word domain.
http://www.namewinner.com
auction type system, seems to be quite successful although have heard some bad things on various forums.
http://www.expirefish.com
don't like this web site myself but is cheaper than the 2 above
For .uk domains there is a new service (yes, run by me, but thought it was relevant) at http://www.nametrack.co.uk and in the interests of covering the market, a competitor to NameTrack can be found at http://www.detagged.co.uk
I use multiple services for grabbing domains and *expirefish* is worst of all, and my recent experience proved that it is not worth wasting money with them.
I was wanting to get www.domain.com [a high price domain name :)] This domain was registered by Enom - parent company of ExpireFish. So I was kinda posivite that they will be successful in grabbing this domain for me. And the funny thing is, one evening, I checked the domain on my own and it was available to register but *expirefish* showed me that it was *still* not available to grab. Well I did hurried up and got the domain manually and cancelled my account with expirefish for good.
Also, above is just one horror story of Enom - My another experience with them was their fraud/stupidity about not giving me back US$ 780.00 that they took for .us registration - but that is a another story :) :) :) :) <snip>
[edited by: Lisa at 4:46 pm (utc) on Sep. 12, 2002]
[edit reason] No accusations please. [/edit]
eNom is not the parent company of expirefish, expirefish is only a reseller. eNom doesn't have any control over what a reseller promises or does in their business; they are just there to enforce ICANN rules and assist resellers with direct access to the registries.
I too have had problems with RegistryFly (ExpireFish), but eNom has been more then helpful in correcting the problem. They have pulled domains out of RegistryFly's reseller account and then given direct access.
I would highly *NOT* recommend ExpireFish to grab expired domains
I Agree. I wrote 3-4 emails to their support department about a problem I was facing and got no reply, not even an acknowledgement.
I also missed 2 about to expire domain names to some other service (maybe SnapNames). So I guess their system isn't as good as they claim.
As for private services, how does one reach these mysterious entities who supposedly are more clever and better-equipped than all the rest together? A few weeks ago I came across another "already expired but not yet released" name which I suddenly lusted for, but others already had both Snapnames and Namewinner watching it. I approached a person who claims expertise in this area to see about getting some help, but the person brushed me off with a totally useless answer.
I'd have been willing to pay into four figures for effective help obtaining the domain ... if I could have found one of these elusive domain-grabbing experts.
BTW, the new owner hasn't done anything with it, but says it's not for sale. I checked.