I’ve always been curious about the workings behind expiring domain names, and how they end up in the hands of companies who specialise in “drop catching” and re-selling these expired domains, or building new websites on the remains of these now defunct domains, often using the links to the original domain to drive traffic to them.

Now that I’ve got my own company, it seemed that there really was no reason why I shouldn’t finally find out exactly how this works, and so I did it. Nutmeg Data is now an approved Nominet domain name registrar, able to sell all .uk domain names, and more crucially for what I had planned, have access to the Nominet domain name systems.

The process of joining Nominet was pretty simple – you pay £400 to join (plus £100 per year after), a small annual fee to get access to DAC, the “Domain Availability Checker”, and take an online exam to show I know what I’m doing.

Once that’s all done, you need a list of expiring domains, some software to interface with Nominet (I wrote my own in Node.JS), a server to run your registrations from, and lots of patience.

The patience is needed for one simple reason – drop catching is a pretty opaque business. You need to find out that a domain expires as soon as possible (it’s measured in milliseconds), and send in your registration request immediately, then wait and see what the result is. More often than not, the answer is “The domain already exists”, because another drop catcher has got in first. That’s followed by a period of tweaking, adjusting, rethinking, and trying again.

So far, I’ve not quite made a fortune, but if you do want some Accommodation in Glastonbury or Spanish Lessons, you never know, you might find it from one of my sites.

These 2 pages are currently holding pages, but both domains already get visitors to them (unlike a couple of the other domains I now own), and seem to be suitable for turning into working websites, so over time I’ll add more posts to the blog on how things go.