Drop Catchers

By Rich Eichacker
Vibrance Technology Corporation

Each day roughly 20,000 domain names expire and are released by domain registrars such as VeriSign and Network Solutions because they were not renewed by their owner. As soon as these names are dropped “drop catchers,” companies such SnapNames.com and GoDaddy.com, purchase the domains and auction them off. Those that don’t sell are pointed to web pages loaded with advertisements.

Domain names have become very valuable in the age of the Internet. If your business has a presence on the web and you’ve registered one or more domain names to access that site then you MUST protect your investment.

How the Drop Catcher gets your domain

The registrar sends an email to the domain’s owner about 60 days before expiration. If the domain name is not renewed by the expiration date, the drop process begins.

Phase 1: Once a domain has expired, it is marked for deletion, but ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) guidelines call for a 45-day renewal period.

Phase 2: After the 45-days, ICANN guidelines call for an additional 30-day redemption grace period.

Phase 3: At the end of Phase 2, the domain is finally dropped from the registry after an additional 5 days (a total of 80 days from start to finish). It is now available to anyone.

Once the domain is dropped, there is a mad rush of companies that try to register the domain, literally flooding the registrar with requests (not unlike a denial-of-service attack). Many of these companies have contracted agreements with registrars that automatically transfers the domain to them during the Phase 1 period. An agreement between Network Solutions and SnapNames.com is one example.

The new owner will then auction off the domain name to the highest bidder. In some cases, the transfer and auction has taken place before the 80-day waiting period, making it even more difficult for the owner to recover their lost domain.

Ways to avoid losing your domain name

Good: Reserve the domain for as long as possible. Currently the maximum is 10 years.

Better: When registering a domain, use an email address that will not change. An email account with hotmail or yahoo for instance, may be more stable than the email provided with your internet service. Anyone who had email problems when attbi.com switched to comcast.net can attest to this.

Best: Schedule your expiration date so that you will be reminded to renew. This reminder can be easily setup in any number of software packages: Quick Books and Outlook, for example, or on your PDA.

In short, DO NOT rely on other parties, including your hosting company or the domain registrar, to keep track of expirations! Your failure to renew will result in the domain being dropped, and possibly lost forever, whether or not you got the registrar’s email.

Summer 2006 -Volume 16, Number 3

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