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Comment by phlux | Hacker News Reader

A friend of mine who has 800+ domains was searching for a name for his company on godaddy and found one he liked. He spoke to his business partner that evening and they agreed on the name.

The next day he went to register it and found that it was taken... by godaddy.

Godaddy then set it as a "premium domain" and changed the price to $500.

He was pissed.

He accepted the version of the domain with a '-' between the two words instead. He recently emailed godaddy and let them know that he has 800+ domains with them, explained what happened and said "I would like the domain that you took, unethically, for the regular domain registration price that all available domains go for or I will take my ~$9,000 in annual renewal fees to another registrar.

He has not heard back from godaddy. But he switched his searches aways from them.

I on the otherhand, typically only search for a domain if I am willing to spend the 10 right then to grab it.

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Alright, I'm doing an experiment - I've run the following shell commands:

function randomWord() { head -n $(numrandom /1..$(wc -l /usr/share/dict/words)/) /usr/share/dict/words | tail -n1; } echo $(randomWord)$(randomWord).com

This has given me an obscure two-word domain name, which I searched in GoDaddy - all subdomains GoDaddy sells weren't registered.

I've repeated this to give a total of twelve domains. The final two of these domains are saucepansgrooming.com and rivaledpopping.com. The other ten domains are written on a folded over piece of paper, and aside from me, the only place they have been disclosed is in a GoDaddy search (which was sent unencrypted over the Internet - so technically someone could have sniffed it). I haven't even attempted a domain name resolution on any of the 12 names.

I plan to come back in a few hours and repeat the search to see whether the names are still available.

Another domain they have taken, which is an available domain, and attached an arbitrary "premium" price on is Imbued.com which they want $625 for. Which is BS.

I've checked back via the GoDaddy interface, and all twelve domain names are still available (on all the TLDs that GoDaddy sells) at the original price.

This doesn't necessarily mean that GoDaddy doesn't ever take domains - maybe they only do it from high value customers who they think they can extract more money from, rather than people who aren't logged in; maybe I searched for too many domains with too few common substrings so their algorithm classified me as not wanting to seriously buy; maybe I didn't wait long enough because they manually decide which ones to buy; maybe the names I tried are too long to be considered valuable.

It took me a couple of weeks before mine disappeared, and during that time I had run searches to double check the availability. The domain name was totally random so it feels extremely far-fetched that someone happened to register it just before I was about to purchase it.

I wonder if checking multiple times in two weeks flagged your name as "popular but unregistered", prompting its' registration? I doubt any registrar would grab every single name, but ones that suddenly got search hits probably get snapped up.

Like the article suggests, I always search at the terminal. If the name is available it gets registered then. I look at it as 8 bucks buying me a one year option on the name.

Yeah, you may have a point there. I for sure won't repeat that mistake again. Having my .com domains snapped away from under my nose is definitely the most annoying part of branding.

Good idea, but maybe they're more sophisticated. You note higher traffic customers as higher risk. The front-running might be done by employees, opportunistically and episodically. Or they might screen somehow for silly phrases.

This experiment is pretty arbitrary -- I guess they would only register good domain names if they pop up, not just random ones.

The question is, did he switch his domain registrations away from them?

This just happened, so I don't have an update yet.

Likely he'll either transfer them when they're up for renewal (a transfer often costs roughly the same as a domain registration but comes with a few renewal) OR sometimes if you talk to a big registrar like fabulous, they'll make allowances to bulk-transfer names in at a significant discount.

If you have a discount club membership with Godaddy, and I imagine with 800+ your friend has one, a .com is less than $8, so that's not $9k in fees, but more like $6.2-6.3k.

It would be close to $9k at any other registrar though, so I suspect your friend will end up like many before, including me, learning his lesson but leaving the domains there.

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