Zarr Blog :Experiences of running a UK web design company

Although thousands of domains get reserved each day, there are also many that expire.  I’ve blogged before about domain names and how some are worth a lot of money, and also the “£1 a day from lots of sites” concept.

I’ve recently reserved some other domains which hopefully will fall into this category and they are:

Vonca.co.uk
IronmanComics.co.uk
OffersandDiscounts.co.uk
Snogged.co.uk
TheSpermBank.co.uk

At the moment, there are just holding pages up for these domains and content will be added shortly. The holding pages plus the links above will allow the sites to be picked up by Google, and the content and Adsense will get it ranked hopefully quickly for keywords.

My background is in programming and when I have ideas, its extremely easy to sit down, start programming to find data, analyse data or do “something” without having to write a brief and get a programmer to do it for you - and saves on the cost too.

Over the past year or so, I’ve been extending my portfolio of domain names and the chance of registering a good domain name is quite rare as millions of domains (even .UK domains) have already been registered.  LLL or three letter domains are extremely scarce and even if they don’t make sense, e.g. UZK.com, then they can still go for money.

A lot of people reserve domain names, and loose interest or forget about them and when the domain comes up for expiry, they let it lapse and after a period of time, the domain gets deleted and is available to reserve again by anyone.

Existing domain names will have a history, potentially back-links from existing websites and other “factors” that can be of value to a new owner.  They may want to quickly get traffic and start earning money from it (see my article on lots of sites earning £1 per day).

Some registrars (e.g. Network Solutions, Nominet) provide services that allow people with a technical background to programatically do the same as what you can do to check domain names but hundreds of times per minute.

I spent a few hours this weekend developing some program code that uses Sockets to look for available domain names (I’m being deliberately vague with some details as I don’t want to give away too many secrets), and after finding a dictonary of words, I was able to scan over 26,000 terms/words in just under 30 minutes and see whether the domains were already registered and give me a report on what was available to register.  One word domains are often valuable and one of the ones I’ve just reserved is snogged.co.uk.

What I’m now able to do is to extend my little program to check for when existing domains expire and get deleted and then try and reserve those domains..  The technique is known as Drop Catching - effectively catching/reserving a domain as soon as its been dropped/deleted.

One problem I do have is not enough time to try all these things out, but with more domains being reserved each day, the number of good domains not already registered is diminishing fast and anything you can do to give yourself a headstart is got to be worth a try.

I’m a programmer and have been programming in some form for the last 23 years.  Thats makes me sound very old, but I’m not!  I first started programming from a Sinclair Spectrum Basic manual in 1983.

Being a programmer has its advantages in that if I want to quickly knock up a website, I can - and I did that just a few minutes ago - partly for a small business idea, and partly to see how quickly Google can pickup a brand new website and domain name.  I reserved it about 20 minutes ago,  a small 3 page site is up and running and its linked into an affiliate programme - check it at warm legs.

Now you may wonder why I’ve got an interest in that type of site.  Well I heard on the weather this morning that its going to get colder, girls in the office were saying that they found it cold and I also received an invite to an affiliate programme.  The cogs starting moving, I did some checking of domain names and the rest you’ve probably seen if you clicked on the link above.

Bet you are wondering how this relates to the title of this post… Well for a while now I’ve been building up a portfolio of domain names - some quite good names, others have less potential but I plan to get a mini-site up for each domain name, do some basic content for each site, get the sites indexed and see what happens. 

If I’ve got say 100 sites and they each earn £1 a day, thats £700 per week, or £36,400 per year.

It took me about 20 minutes to get the domain reserved, got the site up onto the internet, so we’ll see later in the year how profitable that 20 minutes was!

I’m also monitoring how quickly the search engines pickup the new site as its got backlinks from some of my other sites and on some blogs I’ve read that people have reported new sites appearing on Google within 3 hours…  I’m expecting a week, but I’ll monitor and will report here shortly.

For those of you living in the UK, you may have heard of 123-Reg which are one of the biggest registrars in the country - with lots of customers.

Their prices are low and like most companies, they have a control panel for you to maintain your DNS and other details.  Personally I don’t use them, and never have because I prefer the more comprehensive service of GoDaddy.com. 

But after buying an existing domain name from another person - who had it registered with 123-Reg, getting it transfered should have been a straight forward process.  I can only comment from the GoDaddy control panel, but the idea is that you make the transfer request, an email gets sent from GoDaddy to the administration contact for the domain with a Transaction ID and password inside the email.

The administrative contact then needs to supply those to the new buyer - and also the Authorization Code or EPP code from 123-Reg.

Not having had access to the 123-Reg control panel, I knew the authorization code was needed, but the person I was buying off said there wasn’t one.  In the end, and after searching Google for a while, I found the problem, and the solution.

Whereas 123-Reg make it very easy to move your domains to them, they don’t want you to move elsewhere and even their FAQs omit this common question of “how do I move my .com domain away from 123-Reg”.

The solution is to create a support ticket asking something like “please supply me with the EPP code or Authorization Code so that I can transfer my domain to another registrar”.  Depending on when you make the request, you may have a 24+ hour wait for the reply.

Why companies make it so hard to move their domains away I don’t know.  When someone wants to leave or transfer their services away, they’ve obviously thought it through and made their decision.  Making it harder to move away is only going to frustrate them more and never come back - or even make a blog post!