A domain I’d like to use expired a week ago, It’s registered at https://www.ionos.com/
It might be a domain other people are after, as it’s something like mySurname.net
From my small amount of research, there is a 30 day cooldown period, and then another 30 days before it actually becomes available
I’d like to have the domain how do I go about it? I see there are some services that charge ~80 Euro to jump on it immediately when it’s available, but that doesn’t sit well with me.
The domain was only registered 2 years ago, and it’s likely that nobody else is interested in it.
How do I best go about this?
Expired domains first can be bought by registrars and then they might sell or auction it off. For instance godaddy will scoop up a lot of domains and auction them off even if it was registered somewhere else first. And unfortunately a surname.tld probably will invite domain squatters to try to get it and then charge much more for it
You can look into something like dropcatch which they will try to get the domain for you before another registrar gets it. Look into their backorder service and just check the timing to make sure they still can try to get it.
Regularly check the whois info (via icann lookup) to see which registrar currently has it which can help you determine if it has gone to an auction.
I think the general term for this is “domain sniping” or “catching”. From this, I also found this paid service, catches.io; can’t tell if it or dropcatch is better. They both only charge you when they are successful in catching the domain for you, which is good.
In general, I second the notion that one probably can’t get around paying for a professional, paid service, since one is up against professionalized scoopers (godaddy and the like), who have put a lot of optimization (down to the placing of their servers) into trying to get an edge over legitimate buyers and competing scoopers.