Sorry, but chalk this up to lesson learned. It’s almost always been this way. Domain squatters will do this all the time. In fact, some domain registrars will use you searching their site for an ‘available’ domain, and if you don’t buy it up right away – will buy it and hike the price and sit on it for years in order to lock it down, knowing you wanted it.

btw, Namecheap says Sunglocto dot com is like $10 - so just register a .com. Not through that Epik piece of shit that you used before. Legit, use Namecheap; they’ve never done me wrong and have been my registrar for more than a decade now.

Got a work related variant, a 3 letter domain we really liked was registered by a person asking a couple of hundred bucks or so. Which really was a good deal and we were more then happy to pay.

Our IT department advised guiding the transfer themselves. Instead our marketing department went ahead anyway and just agreed to “you end your subscription and after that we register it” … instead of using transfer codes.

In the minutes between, a bulk claimer snatched it away.

Make an offer of $0.01. Assuming the responses aren’t automated, every time they reject it, raise the offer by 1c. Keep doing it till you hit the $15 mark and then just stop. It could waste literal years of their time.

After some time, the domain fully expired and GoDaddy decided to buy it as soon as it did, and charged me £2,225 to renew the domain. I don’t understand how a price that large is justified, considering that my website gets barely any visitors and I basically only use the domain for hosting stuff. No idea how hiking prices this much is legal

GoDaddy is known to do that.

Technically, they’re not hiking the price. GoDaddy bought scalped it after it expired and then is re-selling it at an astronomically higher price. It’s one of the many, many reasons people hate them.

I’m ashamed to say I still have a couple of domains with GD that I haven’t migrated yet. This post might just light a fire under me to get that done.

I have my dream domain. It was being squatted for a similar amount. I offered £100 and it was declined, I offered £250 and they replied to tell me the domain is easily worth the £2K, well sort after etc. I told them that this is my surname, and I’m not a corporation with unlimited funds and they can take the offer or leave it. 15 minutes later the offer was accepted. I was so happy. Still am chuffed about it.

tldr - lesson learned. buy a new domain and move over to it.

but for those who want to learn something new - you are only renting your domains. If you fail to pay by the registration date then you generally get a grace period to pay more money to renew it. If you fail to pay before that period expires then the domain will be released. Some companies like godaddy will automatically buy the domain for another year (or more). But even if Godaddy doesn’t then it still goes up on a list of expiring domains and there are backorder services that will try to buy the domain or auction them off.

So in the end it doesn’t really matter what registrar you use. If you do not pay, it goes back to a list where people can see it is expiring and then you’ll get some people who either want to legitimately use that domain or more likely they are wanting to try to sell it to you or someone else for more than they buy it for.

And I saw someone mention file a complaint. I’m sorry to say that if you did not have money to renew the domain then you aren’t going to be able to do that either. This is called Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) and the fee is between $1500-4000 for 1 to 5 domains.. Additionally, just because you file a complaint does not mean the issue will be resolved favorably or timely. These complaints can last years, and there is no guarantee you will get the domain back.

This is why you should always pay your domain rental fee. And if you don’t, then you need to either be willing to pay a ton of money to get it back or you will need to move on. Sorry its a tough lesson to learn but if you’re just a student then you probably weren’t using this to run a business or anything so in the end you are quite fortunate.

I am sorry that happened to you

Thanks for sharing your story, though. I have a few domains, two of them being very important for me (one I use for all my emails, and the other one for all my self hosted stuff). So I’ll be paying close attention to their renewal

I hope you can find another domain that you like and that you can transfer your stuff to it.

Buy a different domain. Let them pay for this one until the end of time.

Sounds like you’re in the UK, if so I’d recommend legit companies run by old nerds like Mythic Beasts: https://www.mythic-beasts.com/domains

Aaahh capitalism. This is what business school graduates call “innovation” and “smart”.

But seriously, I’m sorry that happened to you. It’s predatory, abusive, and wrong.

Don’t pay this! You just reinforce their predatory practices. How renewals at much higher prices are allowed - no clue!

Something similar happened to a company I know - it expired and was immediately bought by domain squatters, when they found them they were told that it couldn’t be sold back because the squatter had paid $XXXX for and had big plans (I assume it was BS, just a premise to get paid - no site was ever put on the domain)

Solution: they bought the .org version and bought the .com back a year later.

edit:grammar