First Catch

Posted by Scott on August 16th, 2008 .

As mentioned earlier in the week I am now registered with Nominet and have my own TAG which cost £587.50 to setup and then £100+VAT per year, as a registrar I can register domains directly with Nominet making them slightly cheaper, it also gives me access to their DAC (domain availability checker) and with a TAG it means I can query/check and try and register domains that have not been renewed or have been cancelled.

This improves my chances of getting a nice one word domain for £5, some interesting things to know about the DAC are:

The DAC is limited to four simultaneous connections per member, or group of related members.
Queries can be sent to the DAC without waiting for the previous query to return. 
The DAC will just queue the queries.
The maximum query rate is 1,000 queries per rolling 60 seconds recalculated every 5 seconds and a maximum of 432,000 per rolling 24 hours, recalculated every five minutes.
If you exceed the query limits a block will be imposed.

There are so many people trying for the same names some using techniques or judgement to try and improve their chances by using their allocation at certain times of the day, still looks like a bit of a lottery. Yesterday there was an LLL.co.uk which dropped early, the only other decent domain I knew of that I was interested in I managed to register, my first catch on the drop! …

‘Happy days dad’ as my son would say :)
A nice one word domain that describes a manner of things, a period in time, furniture, good name for a hotel or organisation. Possibly the only decent domain I’ll ever catch but the governed board of elected gods were smiling on me yesterday and in that millisecond made sure my fees to date have been more than covered.

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18 Comments »

Comment by Amit Bhawani from Tech Blog
2008-08-16 13:24:03

You cannot find single word domains in other TLD’s isnt it?

Amit Bhawani’s last blog post..50 Best Rapidshare Search Engines & Tools

 
Comment by Poems from Christmas Subscribed to comments via email
2008-08-16 20:54:01

You are lucky!!

 
Comment by Nigel from ParallelP on Twitter Subscribed to comments via email
2008-08-17 05:47:29

Very nice catch. That one’s a keeper.

 
Comment by mally from Petition Subscribed to comments via email
2008-08-17 18:45:47

Hi Scott.

Thats a great catch, can I ask where you find out about the names that are going to drop in advance?

cheers

Mally

Comment by Scott from Scott
2008-08-18 07:19:24

I use a few different lists, there is Dropsystem.co.uk which is £50 per month, if your a member at caught.co.uk and login there are drop lists and also sites like whythink.co.uk

 
 
Comment by Siberia from Quality Avatars
2008-08-17 21:24:12

Guys, any advice on finding out common typos/type-ins of urls?

Comment by Scott from Scott
2008-08-18 10:37:11

Typo’s are not something I have worked on myself Siberia, there’s no way to actually know how many type-ins a domain gets as far as I am aware unless you own it.

 
 
Comment by Jamie from Football Tracksuits
2008-08-18 11:24:48

Hi Scott

Do you use a drop catching script for the domains you are after or are you doing it by hand? How would you suggest you go about developing a drop catching sript if you are a non techie?

Comment by Scott from Scott
2008-08-18 15:09:48

I am using a hosted script developed by someone else, I will try a couple and do a post on my results.

 
 
Comment by Bjarke from BitnoCom Subscribed to comments via email
2008-08-18 11:54:43

A nice tool to find typos in domain names is Typosquat24.com.

Comment by Siberia from Quality Avatars
2008-08-18 19:54:39

Thanks Bjarke, great tool

 
 
Comment by Justin Cook from SEO Toronto Subscribed to comments via email
2008-08-18 13:39:27

So in retrospect then, was it worth the money it cost to get that one domain?

Justin Cook’s last blog post..What to do when you’re dropped from Google’s index

Comment by Scott from Scott
2008-08-18 15:11:32

Absolutely Justin, within 15 minutes of registering the domain I received a sob story about how someone used to own it and then a 4 figure offer so if I sold it I’d be well up.

Comment by Mikael from Internet Markedsføring Subscribed to comments via email
2008-08-21 22:39:50

You keep surprising me Scott. I see what you’re doing and I believe that I understand it but yet I am still amazed every single time you buy a new domain and get great offers from people wanting to either buy it or lease it from you. If you would have asked me whether or not I wanted to buy Regency I think my answer would have been “No, I don’t know what to do with it”. But I guess that is why you make more money than me doing this :)

Mikael’s last blog post..Want Your RSS Readers To Dictate Your Content?

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Comment by Andy W Subscribed to comments via email
2008-08-19 12:56:53

Scott, do you accept other peoples sites for your lease-a-domain site?
For example you act like an agent, list a site for lease, advise on the transaction, legals etc (depends if you have time) charging a fee based on the monthly rate, if the fee was an ongoing one it could be built into a nice residual income.

Great site by the way, the first one I ever read about internet marketing when I first got started (about 3 weeks ago!!!)

 
Comment by James from Discount Codes Subscribed to comments via email
2008-08-19 13:01:00

I’ve not heard of the DAC before (well, I’ve read up on it now!). I’m assuming that DAC is used by sites like domdat to provide users with expiring domain searches or is this a different tool?

James’s last blog post..Halfords Offers and Deals

 
Comment by Scott from Scott
2008-08-19 13:47:17

Hey Andy - no that isn’t something I do at present, I need to get my feet wet a bit more before I started pretending to be an authority on the matter. It would e an option next year seeingas leasadomain.co.uk ranks well in the UK for it’s main keywords.

 
Comment by StephenB Subscribed to comments via email
2008-08-22 22:24:15

nice catch. Was surprised when I saw the name on the whois… another new one on the scene!! :) My first catch was hiya.co.uk… ah those were the days. Less competition!

S

 
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