Ask HN: Is auctions.godaddy.com a scam? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is auctions.godaddy.com a scam?

5 pointskull4 comments

Looking for your startup name with a good domain is hard. I found few nice options, 4 letter domain names with Buy Now option on auctions.godaddy.com. Those were domain names with words you can find in an English dictionary. So, I wanted to purchase them both, well, I can always sell them. When added to the cart, I was progressing with a purchase. At one point my browser froze, and I saw Godaddy website was doing something in a background. I refreshed the page after 15 min of waiting and… a message showed up that this domain was recently sold and is not available. So, either auctions.godaddy.com has outdated / fake data or Godaddy just used some algorithm to see I am trying to get a good domain for cheap and just grabbed it before me?

Edit: spelling

View on HN

The premium domain marketplace puzzles me. I once had a domain name registered that was fairly obscure (a play on my actual name, not a real word, not close to a misspelling of a real word/phrase, not obviously useful to anybody but me) and that I never actually used, but within a week or two of my registration expiring it had been snapped up and was now listed for sale for $500.

I set up an alert in my calendar to remind me a year later, thinking that once the new registration expired, it might again be available for a normal price. But when the time came, the new registrant had renewed it for a second year, and it was still listed for $500.

Fast forward to today, when I saw this item on HN and it prompted me to go check on that name again. Turns out the registration expired a few months ago, and I just registered it for $10.

But I can't imagine why it was snapped up by a broker in the first place, i.e., why anyone ever thought it would be worth $500, and I can't figure out how it could possibly be profitable to squat on vast quantities of domains like this. The whole thing seems vaguely scammy to me...

Sounds like it was bought in hopes that the previous owner (you) had let it expire accidentally and invested ~$30 over a couple of years in hopes of turning that into $500. Doesn't have to get buyers too frequently for that to be a profitable scheme.

Yes. I too 100% thought it was a scam and called in multiple times from burner numbers, but I made 1.5k from a domain name I purchased years ago for a website I never started.

I've successfully bought a domain on auctions.godaddy.com before. That being said, I am pretty skeptical about the entire "premium domain" market.

Like eBay, there's a good chance you'll need to game the system a bit: Don't bid until seconds before it ends, and be prepared for other parties (including domain resellers) to bid it up right before the end.

I had a .net address and the .com became available at GoDaddy's auction site, presumably because it was left to lapse by the previous owner. In the seconds before the end of the auction, it got bid up an extra $100 or so, but I managed to snap it up for, I believe, $112, which wasn't that bad.

A site I have control of lost it's .com when a friend passed away and we were unable to secure access to the domain before it's subscription lapsed. It's marked as a premium domain (presumably because it got a lot of traffic back in the day) for the sale of a couple thousand dollars now, and has been that way for a while.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com