The Dirty, Dirty Domain Resale Business: How PP got an alternate domain name

http://power-pirate.com has been our online homepage for about a year and a half now. It has gone through 2 major layout changes, and comes up first when you Google “Power Pirate”. We are quite happy with it.

Recently, we’ve seen some problems with the name, though. At the time when we started using power-pirate.com, powerpirate.com was already taken. However, with our recent NBC interview and with the amount of new fans coming to shows, it’s become clear that saying “power hyphen pirate dot com” is really inconvenient.

We got lucky. I looked in mid-December to see when the current owners’ hold on powerpirate.com would expire. At the time, it would expire in 15 days, after being held under the same owner for up to 10 years. I started investigating what the best way for us to get a hold of it would be once it expired.

Enter the domain resale sharks – pool.com, snapnames.com, and godaddy.com. The way their business works is that once a domain is no longer being renewed, it goes through a couple stages before it is available for others to buy. In this pre-release period, you can backorder domains.

Backordering involves enlisting one of the above companies to use their servers to try to catch their domain the SECOND it is released to the public. It can be pricey, depending on what website you use and what the domain is valued at. Once the domain is caught by the website you used, though, a quick bidding period begins. So, if someone else is interested in your domain, the website that you amicably trusted to get you your domain can auction it off to a higher paying customer. 🙁

Power Pirate used snapnames.com to get powerpirate.com. It is considerably more expensive than GoDaddy, but we read some negative reviews about the former. Using SnapNames was playing it on the safe side, and in the end we got powerpirate.com with little trouble… just a big bill.

Anyway, go test it out! http:// is now a redirect to our website. =)