When you buy a domain, in fact you only really rent it, for a specified period, of between 1 and 10 years, if after that period you don’t renew the domain it will become available for anyone to register.

Amazingly, every day, around 50000 (yes fifty thousand) domains are deleted from the domain registries because they weren’t renewed, most of these deleted domains are of no value, however amongst the dross there are diamonds, a name may be good of itself, or it may have existing traffic that can be monetised, or it may be well placed in search engines so may bring traffic to a site quickly.

Almost all expiring domains of any value are automatically registered within seconds of becoming available. They are registered by bots (software robots) working for various registrars. Most are just being tasted, to see if they have any value. Tasting is the process of registering domains ,using them, and then canceling then if they aren’t considered worthwhile. Generally it’s possible to register a domain and cancel within a grace period of about 5 days and get most of the fee refunded. As always the cost of depends who you are, or who you know, but at most it’s $0.25. Some domains are automatically registered and placed in auctions, and some are registered as part of the backorder process.

However, many of the automatically registered domains, are cancelled (sometimes called refunded) within the grace period, and may then be tasted again, and again….

So, if there is an expiring domain that you want, you can backorder it with one of the backorder services, they generally charge $60 if they get the domain for you, If you don’t get it at backorder you can see if it’s being auctioned, or you can wait a few days to see if it becomes available.

DropDoctor allows you to search for domains a day or two before they are due to expire, it can then watch your selected domains, check them for availability every hour or so, alert you ,and , if you like, automatically register them for you if they become available. DropDoctor also checks a large number of potential traffic domains every day, that is domains that have Google PR or pages in the Google index, the constantly updated list is available to Gold subscribers.