What happens to sites if you don't stay paid up.

[Chuckt]

A user I know was about to let his domain name expire. What happens if you let your website name / domain expire? A cybersquatter like a domain company gets ownership of it and they want thousands of dollars if you want it back.

There are sites that will tell you what your website is worth. It is based on how many people visit the site and other factors but websites that have been owned for ten years or more are worth more than small websites. This can be problematic if your website is worth $6,000 or more and if you let your website expire.

For fun, I emailed the people selling an old domain and I told them I wanted to buy it for $30. They emailed me back and said my bid is too low and that they want thousands. I emailed them back and said that I would pay $30 and that I would rather make up a domain name then pay thousands of dollars.

Even though someone is cybersquatting the site, it is basically dormant but when I go to find out how much it costs, the site I want to buy costs $9,000+ dollars. The history says it has been owned for ten years but that isn't the truth because the people who now own it are probably the hosting site if that is the case because it wouldn't be a continuous ten years.

So if you own a website, plan accordingly. Many people who put time and effort into their site generate traffic that can't be replaced. I can't tell you what the solution is if you don't want your site anymore but someone will buy it and won't sell it back to you unless you pay the most for it.

[Garth]

Kidnapping comes in all forms. The quantity of corruption is staggering, anywhere there's an opportunity. There's hardly an honest person in all of Nigeria, and our own country isn't so hot either.

[brad]

It's interesting that you post this.

The first web site that I made www.retrobrad.com was a retro games website. I ended up letting the domain expire and then after a few months I wanted to get it back. I emailed the new owner who said essentially that I was in luck and they had it for the special sale price of $900. This was $890 more than what I had originally paid for it!

I ended up getting www.retrobrad.org instead and just transferred every over to that.

I also heard that some people would buy domains early on like www.compaq.com before these businesses even had websites. They then held the domain names for ransom and the businesses had to pay big bucks to get them!