This is a story of how I saved $447... technically got to have my cake and eat it too.
I'm now the proud owner of modernchivalry.com, which redirects here now. So anyone mistyping it with a '.com' will still get here.
It's interesting how this happened. As is typically the case, the .com and .net addresses of most domain names you could possibly want that are made up of one or two dictionary words are probably already held by a domain squatter. I wanted a .org anyway, since this is not a commercial site, but rather "non profit".
Well, about two weeks ago I got an email from a domain service that makes its money by acquiring domains within seconds of their expiration. They wanted to offer that service to me, since the .com was soon to expire. Knowing this would probably cost a few hundred dollars, I let it slide. Then sure enough, on the day it expired it was immediately snatched by a typo-squatter, and ads were placed on it. They too sent me an email, offering to sell it to me for $457.
This is where knowledge of the industry pays off. There's something known as "domain tasting" where they squatter will register the domain, and if they don't want it within the first 5 days, they can cancel the registration without paying a penny. So while offering it to me for sale, they're also evaluating how much ad revenue they can pull from it by people going to it by mistake. So because I didn't buy it, and because they didn't make enough revenue off the ads to justify the cost (probably made absolutely 0 since there's only about a half dozen of us or so coming here, and I doubt anyone went there and clicked through the ads during those 5 days), they canceled the registration. I was counting on that, and waited it out. So now I was able to get it for the usual $10 fee on GoDaddy.
