Step By Step Guide To Buying A Pre-Owned Domain – Part One

The title might be a little misleading. First of all this is my first attempt in buying a pre-owned domain and second, I am a total noob when it comes to dealing with all those hosting companies and such.

I won’t be going into detail about the advantages of getting a pre-owned domain except that the most important thing is, it is cheaper than a new domain (or so it seems) and you can avoid the Google sandbox if the domain is old enough or have a high PageRank

Where To Look For Pre-Owned Domains

The most popular place to hunt for these domains is of course GoDaddy’s Domian Name Aftermarket. The problem is the domains listed there might run into thousands, some priced as high as $50,000 where you can stage a bid or an offer. What I was interested in are the expired domains which I can buy outright for $5.00

You can rummage through the listings in GoDaddy until you find the $5.00 ones where there is a “buy now” button but a much better site to look for these domains will be FreshDrop dot net’s TDNAM Firesale Tools. All the expired domains from GoDaddy are listed here and every domain cost $5. The availability of these domains are scanned hourly so if you can’t find a suitable one today, you can go back tomorrow to scan the pages again.

Domains here ranks from PR0 to PR 10 though I have never seen anything higher than PR6 being listed. You are allowed to filter your search by PR, By Age of the Domain and various other factors. I chose to filter my choice with domains that are PR 3 and above, with a dot com or dot net and without hyphens or numbers in the URL. If you want to browse through the whole list it runs into more than 35,000 domain names. After filtering, I was left with more than 2,000, so that made my search a little bit less tedious.

Buying The Domain

After scrutinizing through the whole list and having found a domain that you like, it would be advisable to check on the domain name to see of it is not blacklisted or if it is still indexed by Google. There are many places or methods that you could use to do this but since I’m not very adept at this, I checked mine at DomainTools dot com. To confirm if the domain is still in Google’s index, typing the domain name into Google search will reveal their index status although I’m quite sure there are better ways which I do not know of.

After everything is in order, click the “buy” button. You will be taken to GoDaddy’s page, where you can start your buying process. This is where the heartache starts if you are a first timer. First you must register an account with GoDaddy’s Aftermarket if you don’t already have one. The registration though quite straightforward will prove to be quite confusing for first timers like me who has no experience dealing with hosting companies.

The page looks simple enough with instructions for you to confirm the purchase. However if you do not have an existing account, you can’t buy just like that for you have to be logged in, in order to complete the purchase. So instead of a straight sale, you will be taken to the sign up page where you are required to register to be a member of the Aftermarket. Membership is $4.99 per year and if it is any consolation, this is a one time affair and after that all you need to do is to renew your membership annually and you will be able to buy as many domains as you like. You are allowed to pay by PayPal which is quite convenient but will be another round of confusement for newbies and noobs.

Registering with GoDaddy can be tedious and really confusing especially during what they call, “secure checkout” Just take your time and try to decipher their instructions. It took me 3 attempts before I can call myself a member, but those who has experience will definitely find it easier.

After settling all the issues with GoDaddy and you have your specially assigned “login number” you can proceed with the purchase, which will be quite simple from this point onwards. A point to note is even though the domain will cost only $5.00 you will have to renew the domain as it has expired. It will cost less than $10.00. At this point, you would have paid about $20.00 for what would be a $5.00 purchase. Another round of heartaches awaits if you do not plan to host that domain with GoDaddy. This will be discussed at the next post.