Know of a registrar who will register a domain that just expired?
 

Howdy - A domain expired on Feb 27 but my registrar says I gotta wait at least 30 days before they can register it for me. Is that right? Can't I get a registrar to register it before the 30 days? It was registered with - ..yuk. .. VeriSign.

Thanks you guys -

you may be waiting much longer than that...


***you can goto snapnames.com but there are still no guarantees...

There is a mandatory 30 - 45 day grace period for an expired domain. When the domain expires, it is dropped out of the root zone file, but is still "registered". It can only be re-registered by the old owner in that 30 - 45 day period via the original registrar.

Hope this helps :P

www.snapnames.com
costs 60$

Snapnames will *try* to register the name for $60. The better the name, the more likely it is they'll fail. They seem to treat all names equally, so they're always trying to register 100,000 names on their watch list. Other services that allow "bidding" on names, with payment only for success, adjust their priorities, so if they have a $100,000 bid on pussy.com and a $50 bid on freenastypussy.com, they might put 99.9% of their retry efforts on pussy.com. That's an oversimplification, as different services also factor in their own estimates of when specific names will drop, but Snapnames doesn't seem to do this well.

There is no way to register the name before it drops. The only thing you can do pre-drop is try to contact the previous owner and make an offer on the name.

In general, you can guarantee that lots of domain pros will be aware of the same name expiring, and will have run various metrics on its value, so if it's any good, you'll be competing against these pros. If it's a name that just strikes your fancy, but wouldn't really have much value to others (maybe a funny play on words or something), then you have a better chance of getting it.

www.dotregister.com has a similar service to snapdomains and I believe it is cheaper too (depending on how many credits you prebuy). It is based on "credits" and the more credits you buy the cheaper it is. So it is $20 - $6.50 to monitor the domain for 1 year. then 4 credits once it is registered with that. (4 * $20 - $6.50).
ZoiNk