The answer: Whenever the registrar says its not! A couple of really interesting things happened over this past week.
1. The General Manager of the Tucows Domain Portfolio (Bill Sweetman) allegedly said “not all of the expired names end up in the Tucows auction. Some names are renewed by the original registrant before they reach the auction, and some of the names are retained by Tucows for our own portfolio.” I’ll discuss more on this Tucows issue later.
2. I missed out on two names at a Snapnames auction. No - This time it was not halvarez or anyone else; in fact, it didn’t get to auction.
The first name was really good. I was watching it like a hawk and I thought I’d get this without any competition. It was coming from a Snapnames “Priority Partner”, so I knew it was not going anywhere else….. or was it?
The day it was supposed to drop the status was changed to “Backorder” and the expiry went to 2009. Yep, something was not right. I asked Snapnames what happened. They told me that that the owner renewed it the day before the name was due to be released to Snapnames. I did my own checking around and found that to be the case. Content similar to the previous site was back online under the previous owners name.
Well… I thought that I still had a fair few names on backorder…. then BANG, it happened AGAIN! (Or at least I thought it did.) The domain status was changes to “Backorder”. I checked the domain name and this time, it was parked. The old site was gone, there were two pop-unders and the site didn’t look all that appealing. The domain is currently sitting at the Afforda.com registry. When I visit their website and do a whois, I get “Request time out. Please try again.” Lovely!
After waiting a few days to hear back from Snapnames, it turns out that the 2nd domain wasn’t from their Pending Delete queue and Snap didn’t actually get it in the first instance.
