Never Let Them Go!

December 5th, 2007

I lost my domain name, kylegilman.com a little more than 2 years ago. I had a registrar who didn’t automatically renew after the first year, and I forgot to do the manual payment. So it went into the redemption period, a murky backwater of domain names where you can pay exorbitant amounts of money to “manually” renew the domain name you paid $5 for originally. I decided to let it expire because as far as I could tell it was of no interest to anyone else in the world. There are at least 2 other Kyle Gilmans out there, but they seem to be youngins without an active, commercial Internet presence. So I didn’t expect any trouble.

But it turns out there are unscrupulous people out there who figure an easy way to make a buck is to snap up any expiring domain names they can get their hands on in the hope that a couple of them will be worth a lot of money to someone. One of these Internet parasites registered my domain before I could get at it, probably using some form of domain “backorder” which automatically registers the domain as soon as it becomes available. So I contacted the fellow and offered $25, which I considered the approximate worth of my domain to me. I was originally told that the minimum bid was $99 which I understandably laughed at. He eventually came down to $40, but by this time I had already registered kylegilman.net and only wanted to make sure he lost money on the deal. I figured even $40 could net him a couple bucks so I decided to wait it out another year. That year came and went and the domain got renewed.

Finally this year I noticed the domain was expiring. So I quickly headed over to godaddy.com and placed a $18.99 backorder on kylegilman.com, assuming that nobody would bother registering it again, and that I was safe anyway because I had a backorder.

But no. Godaddy failed me. Someone else grabbed it before me. There’s something like a 3 hour window when domains are deleted and there’s really no way to know which domain stealing service is going to get it first. So I will wait another year and see what happens then. Some day it will be mine again.

Weird update:Yesterday I got an email from Godaddy telling me kylegilman.com had been transferred to Godaddy. I thought that was a strange coincidence but figured this domain pirate probably uses some other service to steal the domains then transfers them to Godaddy to hang onto/sell them. This morning I did a whois search to find out who the bastard was, and was surprised to find the following entry:

Registrant:
Kyle Gilman
684 DeGraw St #2
Brooklyn, NY 11217
United States
Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: KYLEGILMAN.COM
Created on: 05-Dec-07
Expires on: 05-Dec-08
Last Updated on: 06-Dec-07

The bastard is me! Now if you go to kylegilman.com it redirects to kylegilman.net, just like cameranoiseproductions.com, fictumentary.com, and twonightstand.com. Our long national nightmare is over!

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