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Comment by jondot | Hacker News Reader

I might get downvoted for this, but here's a story. We just finished picking a brand name, after 2-3 months of intensive work.

Being fond of .io's I naivly googled my <brandname>.io, and found that park.io owns it - this happened last week. I immediately sent an email to inquire. We considered the price, and then when I came to buy it today, a week after, the price is tripled. This was a fixed price domain, NOT bid.

That's clever price manipulation. Detect when someone wants something, let it sit, and when they're ready - triple the price. Maybe that's a hint for how he made so much money? In any way we'll just do the get<brandname>.io or something like this, as a compromise. Thanks for being a douche, park.io!

And then, magically, this is now on HN :)

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Hi sorry this happened - most likely it is owned by a park.io user and they can set the price to whatever they want. Feel free to reach out support@park.io and I will see if I can help

Since you're here, maybe you could help us all understand your business better?

1. You are not getting .io names at a discount from nic.io? No insider deals/information?

2. The Only advantage you have at acquiring an expired domain names at nic.io is your propriatiatry program. A program that is just faster at buying these expiring domains--just faster than your competition?

3. You only know when a .io domain name is due to expire is by looking at the same WHOSIS info we look at?

4. I ask these questions because so many of these domain buying services are just to magical. We tend assume the worst.

Thanks for thinking park.io is magical! :)

We have no special advantage other than our knowledge and technology

Thanks--

I'm guessing it works like stock market bids from high-frequency traders?

They've bought up the closest server they can to the bid receiving server at the registrar and/or they send their purchase request before the domain becomes available -- accounting for the network latency -- so that their bid gets there at the exact millisecond that the domain drops.

My personal domain drops at 2018-0X-0YT00:00:00Z, then IIRC it takes 75 days for it to be cleared. So presumably if your request for that domain arrives at 1 microsecond after midnight on that date then you "win" it.

Surely there's no secret sauce beyond that?

That's clever price manipulation. Detect when someone wants something ... triple the price.

Some aspects are different, but reminds me of a similar tactic Network Solutions pulled back in 2008 wrt to listening to domain name searches then raising their price: https://techcrunch.com/2008/01/10/network-solutions-using-qu...

If you buy a domain from a squatter, you encourage domain squatting. Domains are not that important as most browsers send the url to a search engine. So just register brand-name.com instead of brandname.com. Or pick another TLD.

MOZ would disagree with you

https://moz.com/community/q/hyphens-in-domain-name

edit: here's a better article actually on it - https://moz.com/blog/how-to-choose-a-domain-name-whiteboard-...

In 2009 I registered a hyphenless version of a Scientology domain name, and scored tens of thousands of visitors, who I rickrolled.

I would never, ever recommend settling for a hyphenated domain name.

This reads like: If you buy good real estate from someone who has a parking lot, you are encouraging people to buy good real estate. Better to buy a swamp an hour out of town and build your business there.

More like someone occupying lots of parking spots outside the mall, then charging many times the price for you to park there. Or take up many seats in public transportation, then charge people extra to sit, or hold seats until their friends come aboard.

Buys up deeds from people who missed paying their mortgage by a day, evicts the owners, offers to sell it to them - or anyone - at triple the price.

More like renting an apartment after someone neglected to pay their rent, and then continued to not pay day-after-day for the next 75 days. And afterwards, creating a fair bidding process to allow interested parties an actual chance to get that apartment for themselves without having to own sophisticated technology to be the first person there.

This is bad advice.

This looks like cybersquatting and may be illegal.

Please note: I said it MAY be illegal. There are very special rules when it comes to domains. Some people have a legitimate reason for 'holding' a domain. On quick glance, this looks like a legitimate concern.

I am the founder of OpenDomain and we fight cybersquatting - contact me if anyone needs help with domain issues like this.

Yeah this guy (park.io) is getting free PR and manipulating everyone here. It's obvious that he is marketing himself in this thread and calls himself a hacker. The funny part is he has very little hacker credibility if he hasn't been able to get his server up all day.

A big no no is to steal domains that just lapsed on their registration by mere seconds or minutes and then engage in price gouging via a scheme that makes Park.io not legally responsible (because well it's the owner of the domain who had purchased it via Park.io who is doing it, and do we really know that it's that owner or park.io itself hiding behind a some fake user account?)

Anyway, the idea of stealing domains and then ripping off people who are interested in them is really super amoral and stinky.

People should do good in the world, not make it a worse place , and then bate others with how much they make for sake of publicity and more money.

B.S. business model.

If you read the article or the process about how domains expire, they don't actually get re-released until close to 75 days AFTER the domain actually expires.

If you forgot to renew the lease on your apartment and 75 days later, someone else rented it, it might suck or be annoying, but you'd still have to move.

The easy fix? Set everything to auto-renew & have a backup credit card on file.

Recently I let a domain expire. I found out, that in those 75 days, I had to pay $180 instead of $20 for the same domain (namecheap). So, its not the same as leasing an apartment - I think.

It is the same price for 27 (I think) days after expiry though. If you've managed to miss the notifications that your domain is about to expire and then still not noticed for another month it's on you when the redemption price needs paying. Set it to auto-renew.

If you let it expire for two and a half months it obviously isn't that important to you.

I think the most expensive domain registration I've ever paid is $9.99, and seriously if you can't afford that annually, you have no business owning domains in the first place. There are plenty of free hosting options for portfolios.

I'm a landlord. I have this clause in my agreement under late fees:

If Tenant fails to pay the rent in full before the end of the 20th day after it's due,Tenant will pay Landlord a late charge of $20, plus $10 for each additional day that the rent remains unpaid. The total late charge for any one month will not exceed $120.

Even though I definitely should have, I haven't actually enforce it beyond the initial $20 late charge. In fact, I've kind of accidentally encoded a 20-day "grace period" into my lease (a tenant could pay me on the 19th of each month with no penalty, unless I chose to move forward with lease termination). But if you haven't paid your rent by the end of the month, you could have up to $120 extra charged. I'm sure your rental agreement has something similar (probably even more restrictive).

Your registrar enforces a late fee. When it expires, your domain stops working and goes into a 27 day grace period. During that time, you can notice and renew at the regular price. After those 27 days, it goes into redemption period, which has the the late fees.

> The funny part is he has very little hacker credibility if he hasn't been able to get his server up all day.

FYI indiehackers and park.io are run by two diffrent individuals. park.io website is still up. It's the indiehackers website that is down.

These kinds of uninformed incendiary comments make HN so much less pleasant. Firstly, you're criticizing the founder of Park.io's hacker cred because a completely unrelated website (IndieHackers.com) that he doesn't control is down, having done absolutely zero research to find out that that's the case. If you're going to be critical, find out the facts first.

Secondly, as other comments have pointed out, you're being judgmental about the acquisition of expiring domains without any real knowledge of how that process works. It is in no way immoral to buy a domain when it expires. Using the word "steal" is ridiculous. You sound like a media company exec complaining about the internet.

This sort of baseless and lazy shaming that's supported more by ignorance than by cohesive arguments/facts has become so widespread in our culture, and it's sad to see it on HN.

That's how ticket scalping works.

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