Capturing a Domain

After 4 long years, I am once again the owner of JOSEPHLABRECQUE.COM.

Let’s rewind to about 5 years ago. I’d been running my weblog for a while at http://josephlabrecque.com/ and things were going well. I was getting good traffic and this actually contributed to my nomination for the Adobe Education Leader program.

In 2008, I had a humbling experience. It was such a humbling experience that the very thought of having a domain name that matched my own was disgusting. I deleted my weblog – deleted the database, even. Then I went in and unregistered the domain. Canceled. Deleted. Gone.

I tend to react to things in extreme ways… and I felt really good about what I had done. Free of the trappings of the internet and so forth. Feeling as though I had gained some anonymity back. That I was better off without such self-identification. Here is an except of the letter I posted for visitors:

While the content of this website may have been useful for some, it is an unnecessary and fleeting distraction for myself. We have very little time on this earth with those that are close to us and we have to make the most of it. The entire idea of having a website domain bearing my name makes me ill, as the past few months have been rather humbling to say the least. While there is value in what I do- much of it is still dust and ashes and I cannot waste my time on trivial pursuits.

Of course, a few months went by and I started blogging again. I set up a new WordPress instance off of my memoryspiral.com domain and was actually able to reconstruct a bit of the data I found in backups. This is where that weblog has lived ever since, In Flagrante Delicto!

You see, I tried to get josephlabrecque.com back but it had been snatched up by a domain reseller. Apparently, there are companies out there that exist solely to snatch up domains as they expire (or are cancelled by crazy people) and then sit on them hoping that someone will want to buy the domain for some outrageous amount of money. In the meantime, they throw a page up with a bunch of ads to see how much revenue it generates. If enough money is made off the ads, then they renew the domain each year, else, they will let it go.

Apparently, josephlabrecque.com was making someone a nice chunk of ad revenue. After the first year went by, I signed on with GoDaddy’s backorder/monitoring system. The service they offer is that if the domain is released by the current owner, and passes through the grace period without activity, finally to be released for someone to freely purchase… that they will snatch it up for you. Well, the first year came and went with the squatter renewing registration. Damn.

The next year came and the same thing happened. On the third year, I had hope- but someone else snatched it up before my backorder service could. Another squatter. Damn.

This past year, however… was different. I started getting emails from strangers. Emails like the following:

Wow. Hadn’t gotten these before. After checking in with GoDaddy; sure enough the domain was pending deletion from the current registrar. I continued to monitor the cryptic domain status dashboard and these people continued to send me emails offering to buy the domain for me. I stuck to my guns with hope that the backorder which was in place would actually work this time.

On May 4th; I read this:

And later that day, I actually got the domain back. Hot Damn.

So I guess the moral of this story is that persistence pays off (sometimes) but it helps if you don’t shoot yourself in the foot to begin with. If anyone else is going through this waiting game- there is hope. You just might have to wait 4 or 5 years.