Claimit and Domains

Over the last few days, other people have started to use Claimit for managing giveaways. There’s a potential for this thing to pick up steam, and I need to do some more work on the code, but in the meantime I thought it might be nice to actually register a domain for it.
Twiddling whois, I see that ‘claimit.com’ is registered, but the associated ‘www’ site doesn’t have the standard ‘Buy this domain!’ crud all over it. So I fire off mail to the domain tech contact asking if they’d like to sell the domain.
I get a quick response (nice), saying “I have to check with my partners, but note it won’t be cheap.” Folks are STILL trying to cash in on this noise, huh? I sent back a very terse letter saying I don’t endorse profiteering from domain squatting, and went back to whois.
Well, lookee. ‘claimit.net’ is not registered. I’ll take that instead.
The next question was which registrar to use. Unfortunately, my recent experience with Register.com has been poor to disasterous (2 weeks to resolve a broken address pointer in their database), and their pricing scheme ain’t so hot either. So I decided to try Yahoo! Domains for this one. The process was truly slick, costing me $9.95 to reserve the domain complete with A and MX records hosted on their servers. I set up a forwarder so that hits to www.claimit.net will be redirected to claimit.stonekeep.com, and sat down to wait to see how long it’ll take to go into the master nameservers, and for DNS to propogate.
Answer: 23 minutes.
I’ve never brought up a new domain that fast before. Amazing. Stick that in your smoke and pipe it, mister domain squatter.

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A wandering geek. Toys, shiny things, pursuits and distractions.

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4 thoughts on “Claimit and Domains”

  1. I’ve had hades.com since 1993. But when folks send me mail and ask if I want to sell, I’m always willing to listen. And if they ever made an offer high enough, I’d sell it. And yeah, the number would have to be ginormous. I wonder if misterdomainsquatter.com is available….

  2. I’m always willing to listen.
    Sure, but you’re -using- that domain. It’s hardly a squatting issue. This guy is just sitting on it.
    I actually got some more mail from him,
    It is not domain squatting, the domain was bought for a realistic price because it does have a value. The domain was used in conjunction with a clients site, but is at the moment dormant.
    Repeat after me. Post-2001, domains have almost no value. Unless you’re something like ‘bob.com’ or ‘toyota.com’, the price is almost nil. Get over it.

  4. Interestingly, going to the Internet Wayback Machine at archive.org indicates that Mr. Domain Squatter is probably lying about the domain ever being used in conjunction with a client’s site. In 2001, it had “This website is for sale – minimum bid $1000” and in 2002, it had a typical cybersquatter website that looked like a Yahoo knockoff, then later it switched to “this domain for sale.” While the domain could have been used just for mail or some other non-WWW presence, it seems pretty unlikely given what was up on the website.

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