How Great Domain Names Drop

I was looking at upcoming dropping domain names on FreshDrop.net a couple of days ago, and I saw that the nice 3 letter domain name JIS.com was pending deletion at Network Solutions. According to the last Whois record before the deletion in June, the domain name was owned by a company named Jacksonville Internet Services, Inc., and it was registered to a person named Karl Renaut.

In July of 1997, Jacksonville Internet Services merged with a company called Southeast Network Services Inc, whose President was Karl Renaut. After further mergers and acquisitions, I believe the company started doing business as Florida Digital Network, using FDN.com as a domain name. In June of 2007, Florida Digital Network, Inc. merged with NuVox, Inc, where Renaut currently serves as VP Technology Development, according to his LinkedIn profile.

In June of 2008, JIS.com was renewed for two years, and it had an expiration date of June of 2010. The domain name was registered to Renaut, whose email address used the floridadigital.net domain name. Unfortunately for the company, it appears that FloridaDigital.net expired in May of this year.

Whether Nuvox/Windstream wants JIS.com is anyone’s guess since they haven’t used it, but it’s interesting to follow the anatomy of a domain drop. It will be also interesting to see if someone picks up FloridaDigital.net at auction or via drop catch prior to the auction of JIS.com and tries to redeem JIS.com after re-creating the registrant’s email address. I have no idea if that would even be possible this late (or legal), but I am sure it’s something to keep an eye on in the next few weeks.

This should also serve as a good reminder for people to keep their Whois information updated and accurate, especially for companies that use email addresses on their own domain names.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

14 COMMENTS

  1. Elliot, I think you’re mistaken. You’re looking at the nameservers. Take a look at the “status” is says “clientTransferProhibited”. It’ll go to auction if the registrant doesn’t renew. Almost positive.

    FloridaDigital.net has already passed the pre-release window but hasn’t yet been deleted so it’s not in PendingDelete status and it won’t drop in time even if someone wanted to pick it up and recreate the email account.

  2. @ Kellie

    Thanks for the info – I am not very familiar with the domaining life cycle 🙂 I came across JIS.com in the list of pre release names at NameJet (via Freshdrop,net), and the Whois records showed that FloridaDigital.net had expired in May.

    What do you believe is going to happen? I sent an email to the prior registrant of JIS.com and it bounced back as undeliverable. Both names are currently registered to pendingrenewalordeletion@networksolutions.com.

  3. You’re welcome Elliot. They certainly don’t make it easy for people to parse the information, do they?

    If you really want to get in touch you’ll have to go deeper. You’re pretty good at that though, so give it a shot. I think FloridaDigital.net will go to redemption in the next few days. And I think that JIS.com will hit pre-release at NameJet.com as is should be.

    Typically pre-release names get pulled (or pushed, depending on how you look at it) somewhere around the 36ish day after expiry. Generally speaking if a name isn’t ordered the evening before then it will eventually go into redemption assuming the registrar itself is not mining for gold. Somewhere between 40-45 days after expiry the registrar sends the delete command and the name drops into the redemption grace period where it stays until it goes into PendingDelete 30 days later. PendingDelete is 5 days, releases in the drop on the sixth day (if that makes any sense).

    Let me know if you have questions. Be happy to answer what I can.

  4. I repeat, this won’t drop.

    Top pre-release names, such as this one, more then 6 days out from expiration very often will get kept by the registrar if they don’t get renewed. It’s very common. It’s also my understanding that Namejet ‘tests’ every pre-release name for traffic before sending them to auction. If it gets traffic, it gets pulled as well.

    Watch and see.

  5. @dcmike

    I didn’t think NetSol kept names that were dropped by customers. I know companies that do that but didn’t think they were one of them.

    • @ Steve

      Really sucks that it actually happened. I think the spotlight will make this very difficult to sell, especially now that Theo covered the story as well.

      One sad thing is that the guy bought the .net name for $2,500 on Namejet, which means there was more than one person clamoring for the opportunity to get the other domain names that weren’t rightfully theirs.

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