Cybersquatters suck

CJones

CJones

Final Approach
Joined
Mar 14, 2005
Messages
6,051
Location
Jawjuh
Display Name
uHaveNoIdea
Home Airfield
KCCO
When my dad starting building the RV-7A ten years ago, he set up a simple website to post his pictures of the build. Since then it's rarely been updated except for when he started building the -10. A few years ago I helped him move the hosting to my shared hosting account so he could save some money.

Last year I moved my sites over to Linode, but I hadn't got around to moving his stuff over. I got a call from him today saying that his domain had expired and could I look into getting it renewed. When I went to check on it, I discovered that it had actually expired back in February, but since the notification emails were sent to both of our 'junk' email accounts, we never saw them. I went to hover to try to use this opportunity to start moving my DNS registrations from GoDaddy. That's when I realized that his piddly do-nothing domain had been scooped up and is sitting there doing nothing.

The domain is completely useless as a commercial domain. All it was used for was for him to post pictures every blue moon and to have another email account that was a bit unique.

What a lazy way to make money. Yeah, I totally dropped the ball on keeping the domain registered, but the fact that someone has built a business around making other people miserable is ridiculous.
 
Yeah, they blow. Throw an extra character (maybe a hyphen) in the name and register and use that.
 
Also, don't use go-daddy. There are many reputable hosting providers out there. I use BlueHost.com and am happy.
 
Learned my lesson with Gobaddy and domain registration.
I was searching to find availability of a new domain and every time I would confirm it was available it would become unavailable within the hour.

And after a little more digging I found out that they support Cybersquatting crap for revenue through their own interface.

In other words I can sign up with them for $5/month, suck up domains and park them on GoBaddy and track my revenue.

So I am pretty sure some chump was looking at the last search requests then purchasing them from under me and parking them so he could resell for a higher buck. :mad:
 
In my ?defense?, this particular domain was not registered through GoDaddy - it was through HostGator. When I migrated my hosting from HostGator to Linode last year, I moved the DNS registration for those domains to GoDaddy, but I hadn't gotten around to moving my dad's domain. Then I discovered how crappy GoDaddy is for their DNS antics and decided to move my DNS registrations to someone like Hover (based on recommendations here in another thread). Unfortunately, I let this domain expire before I moved it and it got sucked up into cybersquatter land. I bet it showed as having high 'revenue potential' since it had been registered continuously since 2002 or 2003. They're not getting a dime from us, though.
 
Just out of curiousity, how much is the ransom?
 
Palmpilot said:
Just out of curiousity, how much is the ransom?
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If I go to the domain now, there is a place holder page there now. At the bottom of that page is a link to backorder the domain. That takes me to a NameJet.com site with some blurb about putting the domain on backorder with a 'minimum bid' of $69.
 
I don't know how it works but I had a squatter try to grab my domain name after I let it expire inadvertently. They held it for awhile but I got it back about a month later by just trying a normal registration again. I think the squatter didn't pay or something and eventually the name was released. GoDaddy gave me the run-around about the whole thing and I've used 1and1 ever since.
 
Clark1961 said:
I don't know how it works but I had a squatter try to grab my domain name after I let it expire inadvertently. They held it for awhile but I got it back about a month later by just trying a normal registration again. I think the squatter didn't pay or something and eventually the name was released. GoDaddy gave me the run-around about the whole thing and I've used 1and1 ever since.
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Interesting. I'll keep my eye on it and see if it comes up as available in a while.

I went ahead and moved my other domain registrations over to Hover last night. So now my active sites are on Linode and my active registrations with with Hover. It will be nice to have everything limited down to a couple of places.
 
Interesting thread...

I have both of my websites. haaspowerair.com and 700ponderosadrive.com hosted by Go Daddy and am perfectly happy with the web hosting , and even used their templates for me to create both sites myself... They might look a bit cheesy,, but for 5 bucks a month for each site I am satisfied... Altho I wish they still had their site analytics as googles one sucks.... What do ya want for free though..:redface:
 
Godaddy sucks enough that I've moved five or six domains from Godaddy to Hover in the last two years. But we can't blame GoDaddy in this case.

I'm sorry, but if you don't monitor email from your domain registrar you have only yourself to blame if you let them expire.
 
JimNtexas said:
Godaddy sucks enough that I've moved five or six domains from Godaddy to Hover in the last two years. But we can't blame GoDaddy in this case.

I'm sorry, but if you don't monitor email from your domain registrar you have only yourself to blame if you let them expire.
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Yeah.. Definitely my fault for letting them expire - I'm not arguing that at all.

It's still frustrating that people are making their livelihood by making other people's lives miserable and piggybacking on the efforts of others. I guess that's the world we live in these days, though.
 
CJones said:
Yeah.. Definitely my fault for letting them expire - I'm not arguing that at all.

It's still frustrating that people are making their livelihood by making other people's lives miserable and piggybacking on the efforts of others. I guess that's the world we live in these days, though.
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Lawyers have been doing that for hundreds of years...:mad2::mad2:....:redface:
 
Hank S said:
Too bad no one enacted Shakespeare's solution back in the day.
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Shakespeare presented that "solution" as a means for setting up a tyrannical government.
 
Agreed. It was just a brilliant one too!
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CJones said:
It's still frustrating that people are making their livelihood by making other people's lives miserable and piggybacking on the efforts of others.
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You're speaking of the Government, Sir.
 
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