A few years ago I acquired a domain that I used for 5 years called avertigo.com. That domain identifies me because it is my internet alias, without any interest to anyone else, except for a heavy band that had the domain previously and that was precisely called Avertigo. A parked domain is a domain that is free and that is acquired by companies that sell domains and then resell them at an exorbitant price if there is an offer on them after being free. In this article I show how unfair the prices that these pages have to recover a domain are. A price that is an abuse, but that’s the way the market is.
Knowing who owns the parked domain
If you want to know who a domain belongs to, there are many ways. You can use the whois.sc page. On this page comes the information of the domain that was first registered on December 4, 2006 by me as can be seen in Fig. 1.
Making an offer to the parked domain
On page whois.sc you can see that the domain is for sale. Obviously, no one can have an interest in it. If you click on the button to buy that domain we reach a page for us to make an offer. The minimum offer is 888 USD, an exorbitant price. Buying a newly created .com domain can be worth about 10-20 euros, no more. This is clearly an abuse and these companies know that this domain is not going to be bought by anyone. Or yes. It may be that in the future it will be revalued and someone believes themselves as alias Avertigo and starts playing on Twitch or Youtube and becomes famous and really wants that domain. In this case you can understand that these companies make money like this, but if the domain is unattractive I cannot understand that they put that crazy price.
The difficult path of bureaucracy
Another way to act to recover a domain that you do not own is to contact the registrar, the company that has the domain right now and that basically what it does is resell it at astronomical prices. That registrar is epik.com. I contacted an operator asking for a fair price. However, I receive an email from someone in godaddy.com in which instead of asking for a minimum offer of 888 USD, he asks me that the bid for the domain has to start with a 6-digit offer. We have made some progress, for the worse.
How is it possible that I am asked to recover the domain a minimum of 6 figures? Is it some kind of joke? I was about to respond to him and say “okay, my offer is $000010, but when you’re sending serious emails, you have to respond seriously as well. I told him I wasn’t interested in that price.
Pay a commission to recover the parked domain
I decided to access the godaddy.com page to find out if I could regain the domain from there. And yes, it is possible, but it is an intermediate step. They assign you a person and charge a commission for that work. They charge € 84.99 for a technician to take care of the case and offer you their help to recover the domain.
With this service of getting a domain agent, you get a dedicated person who will contact the current owner of the domain and negotiate a sale price on your behalf. If the seller agrees to sell the domain, you pay the negotiated sale price plus a 20% commission and the domain is transferred securely.
How to buy the domain effectively
However, the best way is to go directly to epik.com and buy the domain from that page. Here, you no longer have to pay 888 USD, or offer a minimum bid of 6 figures, but they charge you $ 199 for everything. That figure comprises $7.99 for registration, $8.99 for renewal, $8.49 for transfer and $90 for restoring it.
However, it does not guarantee that you will get the domain since they try to register the domain on your behalf if it is ever available. The pending order can be cancelled at any time and the funds will be returned to you. For the domain avertigo.com there are currently 0 pending orders for this domain, which are handled on a first-come, first-served basis. Obviously, no one can be interested in him, except me who is my alias on the internet.
Summary
A domain is a brand that refers to a company or person and identifies it on the network. Domains once created are registered and have an expiration date. If you do not continue with that domain and according to the use it has had and the positioning in the network, the registrar can take over the domain and park it.
The Internet is full of intermediaries. To get a product many times you must go through several websites to finally get what you want.
