DomainTools Blog

In April, we launched the Registrant Alert service. This is an extremely valuable service. It can save tons in time and money. Jay points to an example of the service in action: alerting him when he was about to lose a domain due to expiration. Another scenario that can be far more hazardous, time consuming, litigious and expensive for domain owners is the possibility of losing a domain to theft. Registrant Alert can circumvent such a situations and useful in other proactive measures.

The service has been available now for a few months with great success and positive feedback. We feel the service is so valuable to domain owners that we are giving it away for free.

All DomainTools members who have a confirmed email address on their account will receive a Registrant Alert on the confirmed email. By default, this alert is sent to the email on account. Users can also subscribe to RSS for notification instead or in addition to. To find this alert service, go to My Services in your DomainTools account and then Registrant Alert. Changes to method of notification are set here. Also, you can change the Nickname of the query by right-clicking, choose Nickname and edit it. However do NOT edit the specific query to anything other than the default settings, it will charge you units. The system will assume this is a new query. A pop up notice warns you of this along with an estimate fee of the new query.

DomainTools members are receiving this for free on their own email with no Units deducted. If you implement the service for other alerts, the unit cost varies by the level of activity of the registrant being monitored.

Users can unsubscribe as well, if chosen, in the same service area. Choose the alert and then turn OFF or delete completely. However, why would you want to remove a system that could alert you of possible harm to your business?

I almost lost my domain permanently because I was unaware it was expiring. I got an alert from our new Registrant Alert system on DomainTools and it saved my ass. I am extremely thankful we invented this system. It is nice to have an example I can point to so soon after launching the service. The alert told me that “Registercom” now owned my domain. That was a huge tip off that the registrar was about to delete my domain. I had won the domain in a Snapnames auction in 2007 and it was sitting at Register.com account that Snapnames opened for me because they Register.com was the old registrar. I normally keep at one registrar that has an auto-renew feature and nothing in my account deletes. However I didn’t remember to transfer this domain over to my normal registrar after I won the domain in the auction.

With this Registrant alert I was able to see I had lost the domain, so therefore and was able to quickly act and get the domain back by renewing it. It would have sucked if I had needed to go to auction to get my domain back. When buying domains at multiple registrar I would highly recommend setting an alert on yourself.

Registrant Alert
The system spots strings that are Newly place on a whois record which were not on the previous historical record.� The system now supports the exact opposite too; It will alert you if your strings get removed from a current whois record. I have set a few alerts on public domainers and I see when they buy or sell domains.

Everyone has to wonder why Google has an analytics system and Yahoo does not. I predict that Yahoo will acquire IndexTools within the next month. The current analytics players are WebsideStory, Unica, Microsoft, Google Analytics, Clicktracks, HBX, Coremetrics, Indextools, and Omniture. With large companies like Google and soon to be Microsoft offering Analytics tools for free it is putting a real pressure on the independent for profit companies that are left. There is not much they can do when their customers leave for the better free products that the big guys offer. I am not going to say how I know…. well… Ok I will since it is a new product, “Registrant Alert” gave it away. There are signs that show Yahoo is acquiring IndexTools.com. I am not going to say what the signs are but setting up a Registrant Alert allowed me to figure it out.

File this one under rumor until it is true but I am predicting you will not have to wait long until you hear the official announcement.

UPDATE: 24 Hours later. The announcement has been made and my prediction is reality! Not bad for predicting the future.

If you thought Registrant Search was cool, you are going to love Registrant Alert! Registrant Search is a great tool, but like all reports, the information eventually becomes stale over time. To help address that, we are proud to release a new alert system that keeps you updated after that initial search.

Registrant Alert is the industry’s first service to provide proactive searching (with a built in alert) if a particular string appears inside a whois record in the future. The alert system works across all registrars and across all top-level domains. There is absolutely no other company in the world that offers this universal watch service.

Here’s how it works. You’ll receive an email when we find a new whois record that matches your search. Our systems are constantly updated to ensure you continue to receive alerts for your saved searches. I have been beta testing this app for a while now and I have to say it is the best service we have come out with yet, hands down! It is still in beta and there are a lot of changes planned, but our team has stabilized the core functionality and it’s definitely ready for production.

Registrant Alert is an EXTREMELY effective service for locating domains that someone is registering in almost real-time. Alerts are sent once per day, and it generally takes us a few days before we find the change depending on how often the records are queried. So although it may take us a bit of time to detect the change in the whois record, you can be assured you’ll be the first person we notify when it happens. Better still, you don’t have to remember to keep pulling a report to catch all the changes for a given search string.

It’s important to note this service will not detect whois records which already use a particular string: it is designed to find new records or records that change after you create the alert. You’ll want to use the Registrant Search service to locate existing whois records and then add an alert to catch future updates.

I simply cannot express how extremely cool this service is. For people that don’t know about it, it’s like magic. To learn how the magic works and how it can help you, please read the Registrant Alert description page.

We are only making the system available to Gold Members of DomainTools, If you are already a member I encourage you to try it out. I promise you this service is awesome!