Jul 21, 2007 | How to snatch a good domain without emptying your wallet

Let's face it: getting a good domain name is practically impossible. When it comes to .com domain names, if you've thought of it and you want it, chances are it's bought by some sleuthlike squatter-shark of a site asking you to pay half your mortgage or sell your grandmother if you want to buy it. You could be patient and wait for a domain to backorder and then pay $369 for it, but chances are it's a bit too much to ask for, especially if you're a college student like me and $369 could pay for a month's rent or a lot of bottles of Coke. So what is one to do?

Where the deception begins
Being somewhat naive and full of wishful thinking, I backordered my domain at GoDaddy in the hopes of it snatching my desired domain on the day it was to drop from pendingDelete, July 19th. I was told that domains drop from pendingDelete anytime from 1 to 2pm, EST, and so I waited, hesitantly refreshing my browser, hoping for a positive sign in the form of an email from GoDaddy. No such luck. I find out around 6pm that the snatch was unsuccessful, and while Pool.com and Enom both did not have live auctions for the domain I wanted, I immediately saw that Snapnames.com had started a pre-order auction.

A pre-order auction is one that requires interested parties to bid on an auction before the closing date, rather than on an existing live auction. This is so that the ones selling the domain can make sure that those who are bidding on it are serious buyers, rather than those who just come across it and want to buy it. As a result, my domain was already beyond salvation, for I could not even bid. And at $60 for a minimum bid, I had very little chance of getting far. It turns out, sadly enough, that my domain was snatched and parked, squatted upon and it will sit as such until next year.

Where hope arises
Being rather impatient and in the mood and desire to continue on my project, I decided that I would go about looking for alternative names, available and unpicked, to buy. There were several choices I could make, given the following criteria:

1) I wanted a .com domain name, no matter what.
2) I wanted the word 'design' in it.
3) The total length had to be less than 15.
4) No numbers, no hyphens, no nonsensical acronyms or abbreviations.

My choices were:
1) Try looking for another domain that would delete in the near future and make another bid.

Chances of this working were slim, but I had already paid $18.99 for the GoDaddy backorder and I wasn't going to put it to waste. JustDropped offers a service to check recently expired domains for the above criteria, but it yielded no results. Whois.net offered a comprenhensive list of domain names available, but sorting through it was tedious and time consuming, and once again yielded mediocre results. This wasn't going to work.

2) Find readily-available domain names

This seemed like a daunting task, but I was determined to find something. Enom's domain name suggestion was useful here, whereby searching for a domain name also brings up a host of other suggestions based on dictionary terms that actually make sense. The recently dugg BustaName provided great results, though they were severely disappointing when it came to realizing that some of their 'available' domains were actually in redemptionPeriod or pendingDelete. That, combined with Dotomator, provided suffix and prefix combinations that seemed promising. NameBoy was revelatory, but disappointing.

3) Find out what the domains I wanted were worth

A lot of domain name appraisals cost a fair amount of money, and the free ones are largely self-evaluation-based. I'm not a big fan of appraising my own domains, because it seems relatively irregular and biased. NameBoy offers a free appraisal based on several unchanging criteria like internet market value and occurence, which makes it useful to compare several domains.

Image courtesy of Literate.co.uk

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