I've wanted to own davidcurry.com for a long time now. Who wouldn't want their own name, right? Sure I should have bought it back in the day, but i owned some other domains and honestly didn't care about it... That changed a few years later and the only thing left was jdavidcurry.com, so I grabbed it. I'd like to get davecurry.com too, but another Dave has that one locked up until 2012. Fine.
SO anyway, earlier this year, I noticed that davidcurry.com's expiration was nearing. I started doing some research and found Mike Davidson's excellent article on how to snatch an expiring domain. Davidcurry.com was registered through Network Solutions, so I signed up at SnapNames and placed my backorder. I'd pay $60 bucks if SnapNames secured my name and figured an auction situation would only happen if there was another Dave out there who wanted davidcurry.com as badly as I did.
For a few weeks I just waited. Then one morning I checked SnapNames and saw that another user, Saggydimes, had placed an initial bid of $60 for davidcurry.com, turning my simple backorder into an auction. Another Dave I thought. Great!
A few days later I got curious and googled Saggydimes only to discover that I was now in an auction situation with a supposed bot owned by BuyDomains.
Fantastic.
Saggydimes had been bidding in an awful lot of SnapNames' auctions, he(it) almost always won, some of his(its) bids were in the thousands of dollars, and now he(it) wanted my name. I mean how much marketing potential does davidcurry.com have? And exactly how much money would a robot(person) be willing to spend?
I was stressed.
Yesterday, right before noon, davidcurry.com dropped and SnapNames snagged it.
Moments later I got an email saying I had been outbid. It was on.
For about 20 minutes, I would bid, and Saggydimes would bid me up. I was prepared to bid $100, but not much more. Then I got to $100 and couldn't stop. I hit $110 and saw another one of these:
How much was Saggydimes going to spend for my name? Geesh!
What really sucks about this "auction" set up is that everytime a new bid is recieved, SnapNames extends the auction by 5 minutes or so. I'm assuming this is done so bots, and maybe slow-clicking patrons, have time to respond with a bid. Thanks A LOT SnapNames.
I placed one final bid of $120 and waited. One minute passed and no counter bid had been placed, then two minutes, then three.
(FYI, I edited this image to fit and removed my actual user id)
Finally, the auction closed. I had secured davidcurry.com. Yay!
I received confirmation from SnapNames, they billed me immediately, but I'm still waiting on an email from Networks Solutions, so there's nothing at davidcurry.com yet.
And the cost? Not too bad in the grand scheme of things. I'm out $120 instead of $60, thanks to a loveable bot(person? company?) named Saggydimes.
If you're name is available, go buy it right now before some domain-buying company snatches it up.
