I've owned medwayhandyman.co.uk for years.
Few years ago a competitor sprang up & used medwayhandyman.com
Annoying but nothing I could do about it. Flattering I guess.
He appears to have gone skint and I'm now getting e mails apparently from half a dozen 'different' people all claiming the .com address is now available & would I like to bid for it - as I own a similar address?
According to the Namehog site its taken but not in use.
I assume this is some kind of scam?
The .com domain expired in mid December and is pending deletion
Not quite, they may be bottom feeders hoping to make a few quid out of you, but there's nothing *wrong* with the service they are offering.
The old "domain tasting" scheme where the registrars could register the domain, see how many hits it gets in a few days then decide whether to pay for it and speculate on selling it, or cancel it paying nothing has gone - that really encouraged bad behaviour by them.
If I were you I'd sit tight, don't reply to any of them, if the domain gets fully deleted, you can register it for the usual £10, not some extortion price
If someone else registers it and abuses it, you might have a case for having their registration cancelled for being in "bad faith".
Go to whois.com and lookup who actually owns the .com (I tried but the site isn't responding at the mo.) If you wanted to buy it, that'd be who to contact. If they are trying to sell then there's nothing to stop them putting it with multiple agents who are the ones trying to sell it to you, plus a commission to them. Of course, it could also be scammers but the whois will give you chapter and verse.
Scott
D'oh. whois.net not .com
Anyway, beaten to it by Andy!
Scott
Not entirely, but chances are that at most only one of them is telling the truth. It is called cybersquatting or opportunism. You should have registered an interest in it should it come available yonks ago.
Check one one of the domain servers to see who the registered owner is.
You perhaps also should think about grabbing medwayhandiman.co.uk too.
In its worst form some miscreant buys up adjacent sites that are one typo away from well known high traffic sites and puts dangerous trojans on them. Some mistypings of Google are so afflicted.
Domain Name: MEDWAYHANDYMAN.COM Registrar: TUCOWS.COM CO. Whois Server: whois.tucows.com Referral URL:
It's expired - and the registrar is TuCows.
After that, it says the domain will enter a 30-40 day redemption/pending deletion period. So it should be deleted any day now.
As others have said, the bottom feeders have detected you have another domain with the same basic name, so are touting. If you buy from them, they will buy the domain and resell it to you with their markup.
Ignore them, check every day on whois.com then as soon as it gets deleted, register it via your usual registrar. Or just query it every day via your registrar - most have a domain-check-for-availability page.
Cheers
Tim
Might have to be quick with the registration or a bottom feeder might get in first.
There might be a way of "registering an interest" as others have said but not convinced as my .com almost got deleted when the reseller/hosting company I was using "disappeared" and didn't send any renewal request or respond to any emails/phone calls etc. Fairly sure I couldn't "register an interest" on my own domain name... Dealing direct with the registry I managed to get it moved to their retail side and renewed for US$9.99 and full control of the DNS. Much cheaper than the reseller and having full control of the DNS is better for me as well.
In article , The Medway Handyman writes
FYI, if you do get it, it's shouldn't cost more than the registration to run as a good host will forward to your .co.uk site for nowt.
As you've found, it's always good to grab .co.uk and .com for a domain your interested in, sometimes .org is worth it too but not really the others.
123 also have a grab it for me when/if it becomes available.
I thought it was pretty common to try to get hold of domains then resell them on for megabucks, maybe its percolating down to smaller and smaller businesses now.
I guess its a bit like number plate speculators of yore. Now of course the dvla watch for these and auction them themselves to make money.
Brian
You say those days are gone, but I don't think they have personally, as it seems they only need to have some kind of holding page on there, or so it seems to me. Brian
Not a _host_ as such! Simply use whatever company you use to make the DNS entry for medwayhandman.com and
I dont think that's ordinarily so. dot com implies USA or global ambitions.
dot co dot uk implies a natinal based company. Pity one can't register as .kent.uk or something.
What used to happen was the dodgy registrars registered shedloads of domains, put up a website for 5 days to "sense" how popular the domain might be, then if it wasn't very good after all, cancelled it not paying a penny, likely then another registrar repeated the same trick and you get perpetual rubbish websites hoping to cream off adverts and that someone might make a large offer for the domain.
For most top level domains, the 5 day grace period was abolished, if a registrar feels like paying to register the domain, they can still do all the above, but registering 10s of thousands of domains gets expensive if it turns out few people actually buy them from you.
What I used to get was people claiming to be a domain registration agency with someone who was looking to register a domain similar to mine. As it might clash with mine, they were contacting me to see whether I had any objection to the name being registered. I could then, of course, pay well over the odds to have it registered to me instead. That didn't require them actually to register the domain name before contacting me.
Colin Bignell
If I could just hijack this thread slightly....
I wanted (as an example) example.co.uk but it was already taken (as was example.com) so I went for example.org.uk instead. example.co.uk has just gone through renewal at the end of January and is apparently theirs until it comes up for renewal again in two years time. However, according to Companies House, that company was dissolved in November last year and entering example.co.uk into a browser just says website not available.
How would I go about trying to get the domain name?
Depends if the domain was legally registered to the now-dissolved company or to e.g. the company owner personally.
If the former, then AIUI unless it was transferred to someone else before the dissolution, the name should be de-registered, I don't think you can lodge a "claim" to it, presumably if they were infringing some of your naming rights you'd have taken action while they were trading? The name will probably end up back in the pot for anyone (including you) to re-register on a first-come basis ...
You would have to contact the domain owner and see if they want to sell it. Unlike .ltd.uk domains which can only be registered by companies, a .co.uk can be held by anyone - so the company being dissolved does not automatically mean the domain would be released.
The answer is that it depends, in some sectors .co.uk is viewed with derision. I certainly wouldn't build a business with any kind of web presence without grabbing both or more. Dave's experience shows why, if you have a good idea, people will queue up to steal it from you/cash in on it.
Can't say as I agree with more localised registration, web addresses need to be intuitive and that's just giving more ways for the customer to be redirected to someone that's not you!
How would I do that Martin?
The only options I can see are transfer or back order. Back order is £25 + £10 charge - expensive compared to what I pay for .co.uk
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.