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.

Some good news from Nominet for domain owners who hate paperwork, from May 2012 you’ll be able to register a .uk domain name for between 1 and 10 years, with the wholesale cost at £3.50 + VAT for 1 year, £5 + VAT for 2 years, and £2.50 for each additional year after that.

This is in line with how things work for .com and most other domains, and seems a fairly sensible decision to me. Based on retail pricing from people like DomainMonster, we’re probably looking at around £35 for a 10 year UK domain registration.

I don’t think there’s anyone left who would argue that the success of the Intel x86 servers was down to commodity hardware being cheap – much cheaper than the IBM POWER or Sun Sparc equivalent kit. This low cost was driven in large part by the shared design and components between x86 servers and high-end desktop PCs, massively increasing the volumes of the components produced, and leading to low cost commodity parts.

Today, we’re again looking at an inflection point in server processors, this time with a potential switch from x86 to ARM. ARM chips run in everything from your washing machine through to your mobile phone, so should be bringing with them the massive resources of commodity hardware volumes, leading to cheaper generic equipment.

But… it isn’t happening, not yet anyway. When you can buy a complete SIM-free Android phone for under $100, the screen-less, wifi-less, 3g-less equivalent hardware (with an ethernet port instead) should be costing $50 or less. Instead, you get HP launching a ARM server range with Calxeda, but essentially saying “They’re cheap to run, not cheap to buy”, and all sorts of dedicated ARM server CPU designer startups.

It almost feels like these companies have forgotten that the real power of x86 isn’t in the clever CPU design, but in the huge volumes of x86 desktop PCs sold each day, driving down the costs for everyone. The only people going a different route that I can find are Raspberry Pi, building a $25 ARM device which runs Linux, but this is aimed at the educational market, not the server market, and has a lower specification CPU.

Am I wrong, does anyone know of a $100 ARM server you can buy today, equivalent to a smart phone in both CPU resources and power usage?

Update: A bit of poking around has found the BeagleBone, which is 90% of the way there, for a cost of well under