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Help Getting Domain I Want?
Okay I have had mydomain.ORG for over 7 years now. At the time, mydomain.COM was unavailable but not being used.
Since then, every year mydomain.COM has continued to be renewed. I've had it backordered with Godaddy for 6 years.
The domain is still not used by anyone. It's still up for sale, but here is the issue:
This site sedo.com is selling it but they require a MINIMUM bid of $4,000! That's ridiculous. My site barely rakes in $20 a month and that's from donations. Any worth to the domain has only been raised by my own site's popularity. What can I do to get the .COM domain I've been wanting for so-long?
I don't get a lot of money and I use my college financial aid to fund my site. I'm 22 and made my site when I was 15. $4,000 is a lot! Any ideas? 
Note: I used "mydomain" in place of my actual site name.
Comments
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=how+to+beat+domain+squatters
It's only 3 letters man I would say stop worring about it.
Why isn't .org sufficient. The domain I wanted wasn't availible in anything but .org.uk, so I got it
I bought a domain off a guy who had been sitting on a domain for 5 or 6 years, but before that it was a fairly popular site. I contacted him personally asking if he was willing to part with it and for how much.
Needless to say he was willing to sell it, I offered $250 and ended up having to pay the $300 minimum he wanted. But that is still not $4.000.
So maybe you could email the domain owner and see if he is willing to part with it for less?
I've tried contacting the owner. I did whois history lookups to find out his name/email but was never successful. I can only email domain-selling-people which is pretty lame.
Assuming you're able to get that .com, what difference is it going to make?
I'll be satisfied and any unintentional traffic going to the .com because they didn't notice the .org would go where it needed to go. I also think the .com looks nicer. Sure, it's not a huge deal. It's not a dramatic change for my site, but I want it.
I didn't need an iPhone 4S. I don't even talk to Siri anymore. I could have done what I do on it with my iPhone 3G but I still wanted it. The question isn't if I need it or should I worry about it. The question is what can I do about this? I was hoping that LET would have somebody with a similar experience where perhaps they had more success.
Just askin'. There's good business reasons for wanting a particular domain. And then there's vanity. I want sleddog.ca. Sigh.
I've come to the realization that certain domains will never be available because the squatters make to much money to just give them up. I've recently focused on only purchasing .CC domains due to their lack of use. I picked up my personal domain which is 3 characters (five with the ccTLD) for a fraction of the cost a 5 character .COM (8 with gTLD) that I want would cost me. I personally like having a really short domain (my initials) and the .CC makes it even shorter than a .COM, win-win!
Taking it from experience with one domain I bought almost a decade ago, lost about 5 years later (Gave up on the project it was targetted for and was stupid not to keep it renewed), and recently regained after a stroke of luck: Domain squatters are a major PITA and unless you are willing to fork over thousands of unneeded dollars, do not waste your time. Best bet is just to keep a very close eye on it and see if it lapses and just jump on it when it does. My particular domain just a few months ago I noticed out of the blue was unregistered after being squatted for many years. Took that opportunity to snag it. I don't know if there are any specific services or apps out there that can tell you the moment a domain changes registration status, but might be worth a look.
the domain's already backoredered, so if that works as how it's supposed to be, it won't matter anymore.
If only that were true. There are services out there that will purchase domains that are back ordered by checking in 20 second intervals to snag the domain before other systems. If it's a popular domain then it might be worth investing in hiring another company to monitor the domain to grab it when it expires (some will check every few seconds, others will check hourly, others daily, all depends on how much you want to pay).
Gonna hijack this thread a little - is there somewhere I could get a cheap three-letter domain with an exotic tld? It doesn't matter what it is really, something like gda.mx would be sufficient.
I can't seem to find any site that ranks domains by cost and availability of short names.
If you are in the European Union, Iceland, Norway, Switzerland or Liechenstein you can now get a domain from Afnic. The requirements were relaxed last month.
Try InternetBS for some tf, wf, pm or yt domains. Plenty of 3 letter & other short domains there. Also you can now get fr & re domains.
@littleguy: there are still some 3-letter domains available in the .BE TLD
Excellent resource!
What registrar do you recommend? Both of the ones listed on dns.be for my country don't seem to be offering .be domains any more.
@littleguy InternetBS offers .be domains
@littleguy: I'm using inforbusiness.com and used eurodns.com before...
I can offer some 3-letter .BE's too :-) (tez, ubu, ubz, vmu, waq, zis, lgx, vsx, lyx, kyx, usy)
Then why do you keep them? 240 .coms would be like ~300 USD/year. Are you actively looking up people to offer them to?
Seem to be reseller only?
Kind of expensive, most domains are over 30USD/year.
@littleguy: could be .... not sure I can use them but have around 100 domains with them..so maybe I have a resellers status with them
That's cool!
I ended up getting a nice three-letter .yt domain - there seem to be pretty of them left and they're only ~8USD/year over att InternetBS. Thanks for everyones help!