Domain Name Tools (for finding, checking, etc.)

[donatello]

Greetings!

I have built a set of tools that I use for identifying/finding, assessing, appraising and checking domain names. With this toolset, I am consistently able to find good domain names (.com) that get searches in Google.

I have refined a methodology that seems to work and it uses a number of the tools on this page.

Anyway, I have hundreds of domains and so have decided to share this tool with others. I want to make it as useful as possible, and so would like some opinions and input from others who are interested in domains.

Here is the UNFINISHED site (Alpha!!!):
Finding Domains (http://www.finding-domains.com)
Q: What other tools would you add?
Any other good links? Tools? Forums?

Thanks for any suggestions! Come back and check the page out in a week or so... by then it should be finished. Let me know if you think it's useful.
I'll post it in the new sites section when it's done.

(PS-FF is having some problems with the Ajax Script, so I am fixing the CSS now... that should do it.)

[tracknut]

One thing I didn't see on the site is the issue of Domain Tasting (I think that's what it's called). The process wherein a whois lookup is used by a registry to grab the domain name and hold it for a few days. I haven't had it happen to me, but I've seen plenty of complaints from folks that were checking around for domains, only to find that domains that were available yesterday had been snatched up (and now available at premium prices). The usual advice is, to NOT check availability through a registrar (godaddy, network solutions, etc) unless you know you're going to immediately buy if the domain is available. Alternatively, it's an issue of finding an available whois service that does not do this domain tasting function.

You probably know more about this than I...

Dave

[donatello]

Domain 'tasting'.


I wouldn't say that I know more about it than you, but it has happened to me with estibot and godaddy... I'm not sure which grabbed my domains.

I had a bunch of them I wanted to buy and then Godaddy went down for a couple of hours just after Christmas, so I was unable to pay for my domains since their site was unavailable (as well as my hosted sites).

I had to leave town for three days, when I got back, two of the domains I had bulk tested were gone.

I just found another crop and think I should probably just buy them and wait and see. I have uncovered a great way to find bunches of good dot-com domain names that are fairly valuable... I guess I should just buy them.

I know for a fact that moniker.com does this.
I suspect that GoDaddy does too.

[felgall]

The thing to do is to do all your domain checking using the registrar you plan on buying from. That way their placing the lock on the domains to hold them for you works the way it is supposed to and you are not locking yourself out of being able to buy them by asking one registrar to hold them for you and then trying to buy through a different registrar and finding you can't because the first one is holding them for you to buy from them.

[andreas]

my doubt is, why not considering the suggestions of the registrar? I found it well...