On Feb 2, 2008 I won a Snapnames auction with a final price of US$173. The domain has more than made its money back, yesterday it made US$1.50.

When I won the name at Snapnames, the registration provider was ItsYourDomain.com. The domain expires in December 2008 - so I thought it was about time that I transferred it out to another provider.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been trying to get the name transferred. The domain is in my account, I have the auth code, transfer shield was disabled - everything is ready to go.

The only problem was that it appeared that SecureWhois appeared to be on and therefore my new registrar couldn’t send emails to the admin and technical contacts. Here is what it looked like:

Registrant
Pending Renewal or Deletion
SecureWhois, Inc.
pending-renewal@onlineaccess.net
96 Mowat
Toronto, ON M6K 3M1 CA
+1.4165385428
+1.4163520113 (FAX)

After a number of failed requests to disable SecureWhois, I received this email from their Technical Support staff:

“It looks like the domain had expired long time ago and was deleted from our system, it is now in pending delete status at the Registrar level. If you are interested we can check the price to get the domain back from the registrar.”

I was thinking… wait a minute…. something isn’t right here… I won this thing in Feb! So after writing back to their support dept asking them to “get the domain back immediately” - I decided to give them a call…. and by some miracle, they answered their support number!

It turns out that I never received the domain in the first place! Although the name appeared in my registrar account and I could make changes to it, the domain was “marked in the system” as being a backorder, and not actually “allocated” to me. After feeling somewhat in the twilight zone, I was told that they would immediately put a request through to allocate it to me and that I should see the change in the whois record. Sure enough, the change went through. That domain in my account that I’ve been making $$ from is now… well… mine.

What’s the lesson learned from all of this? Just because you see a domain in your account at your registrar, doesn’t mean its yours! Check the whois record.

P.S. Yes, this is a separate issue from yesterday. I don’t know whether its the “law of attraction” here, but everything seems to be happening at once!

—-

Dear Simon,
I am sorry to have to inform you of this, but there was a mistake in the auction for <SNIP>. The registrar informed us that this name was available for us to send to auction; unfortunately, the name was renewed at the last minute and we were not informed in time to stop the auction. We apologize for this inconvenience. It is a rare occurrence but it unavoidably happens from time to time. Of course, a refund has been issued to you for the $<SNIP> that you paid for the name.

If you have any questions, please let us know.

—-

Snapnames - the obvious questions are:

1. Who was the registrar?
2. What process have you and the registrar put in place to prevent this happening to other people?

Has this happened to you at Snapnames or anywhere else? Feel free to post and let me know.

As I type this post, the SnapNames website reads:

“We do not currently have an estimated up time. We will try to update you as we know more. It is probable that auctions scheduled to close Sunday will be moved to Monday. Check the site at 10am PDT Sunday for confirmation of that delay. We’re sorry for this inconvenience.”

You don’t exactly give your customers a level of comfort by using the word “probable“. Perhaps your PR / Corporate Communications people should come up with a nice spiel for your web page when everything breaks.

It’s also interesting to note, that this time last week your website was also down.

Snapnames, what’s the deal? Isn’t it about time you provided an explanation for all this downtime?

This is really quite strange as Overture belongs to Yahoo. When you visit the link you get:

To VIP Status: OK
Server Status: OK

The title tag changes to “Hello from Apache :-)”

and then it diverts to the Overture Small Business website. Perhaps Snapnames has included some Yahoo code somewhere?

—

Dear SnapNames Customers:

As you are likely aware, the SnapNames service was unavailable between last Thursday evening U.S. Pacific time and today.  We are pleased to tell you functionality has now been restored and that important data, including transaction history, has been fully retained.

Please note that auctions scheduled to close between July 4-7 will now close at (time EDT) on Tuesday, July 8. Please monitor any auctions accordingly.

We apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced during this time.  Should you have furtherquestions, you can reach us here:

Technical Support:         support@snapnames.com
Telephone:                    (800) 385-4075 (toll-free in the U.S.)
+ 1 503 241-8547 (outside the U.S.)

Sincerely,
The SnapNames Team
—

Their website reads:

Thank you for your patience during the recent outage to our service. The SnapNames system is again fully functional and ready to accept your orders and bids.

Please note, auctions scheduled to close between July 4-7 will now close on Tuesday, July 8 or later. Please monitor any auctions accordingly. If you have questions, please contact us at support@snapnames.com.

Not only is this very unprofessional, but it gives their competitors such as NameJet and Pool a  clear advantage.

There has been some discussion on DNF and a thread on NamePros regarding this issue, but nobody from Snapnames has posted. If you know what the situation is, please contact me.

Here is a selection that I particularly like:

pay.com, action.com, anger.com, athlete.com, gasprices.com, idol.com, jackpot.com, daycare.org, refinancing.net and ringtone.mobi

I’m dying to see how much pay.com will sell for. It’s going to have to be a record breaker.

I just received an email from Snapnames regarding their TRAFFIC East event on May 20-23 in Orlando.

Some of the names that will go to auction are: Israel.com, Pay.com, Jackpot.com, Athlete.com and Hoodia.com. I’d love to get my hands on pay.com and hoodia.com!

What are your thoughts on this? Do the quality of the names, reflect the quality of the conference?

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.