On Wednesday the 12th i looked at a new domain name for a webiste im building, it was available along with every extension, .co.uk, .com, .org.uk, the lot.

I emailed a guy im working alongside pointing out the chosen domain.

Ive just gone to register the .co.uk domain and it was registered by someone else, yesterday.

What are the chances?! Have i just been unlucky and this is a coincidence or have i been gazumped?

 

Is he listed as the registrant of the Domain

 

What site did you use to find the domain? I have my suspicions regarding some sites that provide a whois service.

 

No, he's not. Ive got a name and town/postcode but the name is female.

I s'pose i could check to see if its anywhere near him on a map.

Edit: He's based in Chester and the domain is registered in Westcliff-on-sea.

 

Some registrars are know to list recent searches and there are people around who watch the lists.
If you find the domain for sale in 3 months or so for 10x the cost you know whats happened.

 

Which website did you check the availability on as unless it was the official registrar (i.e. Nominet for .co.uk) then its never 100% accurate imho.

Simon

 

This domain has been registered by BT

Ive checked the whois and it says it was registered on the 13th.

 

Ahh, thats interesting! There is now a page up.

 

Scheming bandits

 

Is this just a coinsidence? I cant believe that domain has been available all this time and the day after i look at it, its gone.

I used Netweaver to check its availability.

 

It has probably been registered by a BT hosting customer, the page may be a holding page

 

i use easily.co.uk to check and 123reg.co.uk to buy, never had this problem but have always been suspicious of this sort of thing...

 

do a heap of bogus but feasible lookups and see what happens.

 

Good idea... any suggestions?

 

I am utterly convinced some of these domain check companies look at all the searches that users do on their sites. I have had similair instances with domains suddenly being registered and then a holding page being up there.

I use whois.domaintools.com/<domain name here> and not had a problem with this. If your looking for a domain name you might also want to do nslookups direct from your PC. Goto start->run and type cmd
in the black dos window type nslookup
then when you get the > type in the domain name.
if its unregistered it will usually say it doesnt exist.

 

As soon as you use whois.domaintools.com/thedomain a webpage is automatically created by them and placed in their index