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Comment by 542458 | Hacker News Reader

So what happens when there are hundreds++ of individuals all interested in a single domain name that will become available at a very well-defined time like this? Do people just hammer the ICANN/registrar servers in hope of being the lucky one, or is it more elegant than that?

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AFAIK, there are even companies that own hundreds of registrars to just do that [1]. Just scroll through [2].

[1]: https://domainnamewire.com/2015/10/09/wow-dropcatch-adds-300...

[2]: https://www.iana.org/assignments/registrar-ids/registrar-ids...

Yep, it's called "domain drop", it's a pretty lucrative industry to be in. GoDaddy especially knows this and will auction off domains before selling them, where as third parties can try and register the domain every 0.005 seconds. :-)

In addition to some replies here, some outfits will even lease their office buildings as close as networkly-posible to the registrars so that they can shave those milliseconds in trying to snipe the domain.

I thought that was only relevant for financial stuff but as for dropcatchers, that's new to me.

They are essentially the same thing. The strategy is the same whether trying to put in buy orders for stocks or domains.

This happens everyday. Nothing new. Hundreds of high value domains expire every week. Some can be worth six figures or more.

Everyone competes to “catch it” but usually, the registrar gets it and auctions it off.

No, there is an auction period before domain being available to public(atleast that was the case with another registrar).

It's interesting; half the replies here say there will be a bot rush. The other half say GoDaddy will auction it off. Which is it?

GoDaddy Auctions is what will happen like all their expired domains

So they have a financial incentive here to allow the domain to expire.

Yes.

> So what happens when there are hundreds++ of individuals all interested in a single domain name that will become available at a very well-defined time like this?

One of them receives it and the others do not.

First come first serve.

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