domain names and holding pages

AHarvey

AHarvey

AHarvey

Soldato
Joined
6 Mar 2008
Posts
10,084
Location
Stoke area
*be warned, its a rant!

A friend of mine is on the board for a local group of people that raises funds for the local town.

They want a website making showing the town itself, what they do and event info etc.

So, off I went to look at costing a domain for 'marketdrayton'.

First 4 I tried:

www.marketdrayton.com - doesn't load anything and is registered until 2010 to Shropshire Newspapers Ltd.

www.marketdrayton.net - has a rubbish link holding page full of random links and section that says "this domain may be for sale". They want $600!

www.marketdrayton.co.uk and www.marketdrayton.org are also these rubbish holding pages with just random links on.

I am just wondering how they can get away with buying up loads of random domain names and not really doing anything with them other than holding them and trying to sell them on at stupid prices!!

Is this common practice? Is there anyway to get your hands on one of these domains without having to either wait for it to come available or having to pay stupid prices?

/rant
 
AHarvey said:
I am just wondering how they can get away with buying up loads of random domain names and not really doing anything with them other than holding them and trying to sell them on at stupid prices!!

Is this common practice? Is there anyway to get your hands on one of these domains without having to either wait for it to come available or having to pay stupid prices?
Click to expand...

Yes, it's common practice, and they "can get away with it" because for many domain extensions anyone is free to register the domain without restrictions, so it's first come first served, and astute people have made a lot of money from domain name trading.

If you want a particular domain that is already regged the only way is to make the owner an offer or hope they forget to renew it and book it with a dropcatching service (but you may have a very long wait!)

The best thing to do if you don't want to spend a lot of money is just register a different domain, e.g. marketdraytonfundraising.co.uk.

Rgds
 
Yep, people got to them first, you missed out.

It's not a trademark, think of some yourself that might be worth loads ;)
 
It does annoy me when I'm looking for a good site name and it's registered but there's naff all there. However it doesn't always mean they're not using it.
 
Sometimes people just want the email addresses and have no interest in actually having a website.
So just because there is a holding page doesn't mean the people who registered it aren't using it
 
it does happen a aweful lot... mind you 5 or so years back I sold a 2 domain names to a well known site for £3000, result :), also sold another for £2000
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom