Advanced Software Tools for Domain Drop Catching

With the expansion of online businesses, a massive growth in the number of worldwide domain name registrations were observed in the last three decades. For domain name registrations, there are over 1500 generic top-level domains (gTLDs) with examples such as com, info, net etc considered as the core group while there are many other country specific TLDs and other newer TLDs such as xyz, fun, app etc. The growth in the number of domain name registrations has also equally increased the number of domains that expire daily or dropped.

Out of thousands of domain names that expire, a vast majority are not valuable domains. However, a select few domains are extremely valuable due to the vocabulary properties such as having popular and meaningful keywords, a good backlink profile, history, and age among other things. Manual valuation is infeasible to properly identify the valuable domains, as many thousand domains expire daily. There is an array of research and data driven tools that can quickly identify and properly value these domains.

Few understand the secretive world of domain investing, a game that a growing number of people are playing around the globe - David Kesmodel, The Domain Game.

With a very high demand for these valuable expiring domains or the domain that drops, buying and selling of these previously owned domain names has evolved into a separate billion-dollar industry. David Kesmodel, author of the book The Domain Game states that “few understand the secretive world of domain investing, a game that a growing number of people are playing around the globe” signifying the importance of the industry.

Domain Drop Catching is the common term used in the aftermarket to identify the process where such expired domains are purchased. Since there are many domain registrars that are interested in purchasing or dropcatching these valuable domains, distributed and automated low latency software specialized for domain drop catching are required to have very high hit rates.

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The core R&D team of Xeptagon developed a state-of-the-art Domain Drop Catcher with bots running at very low latencies

The core R&D team of Xeptagon developed a state-of-the-art Domain Drop Catcher for a European Domain Registrar. The system is developed in a distributed manner where it will invoke 100s of concurrent bots for dropcatching. These dropcatching bots run at very low latencies where EPP (Extensible Provisioning Protocol) commands will be generated intelligently and sent to domain registrars with time gaps less than a microsecond. The commands are also distributed among bots after dynamically considering the communication delays. In addition, the bots also incorporate Artificial Intelligence based data-driven intelligent decision making to accurately predict domain drop times and predict any applicable domain drop delays.

The current ultra-high speed domain drop catching system developed by Xeptagon is used by a European Domain Registrar to catch domains released by leading registries such as Verisign, CentralNIC, Identity Digital (Donuts), GoDaddy as well as country specific TLDs such as Nominet, SIDN, RoTLD among others.