Here's what I'd like to do with expirealert.com...

[manlymatt83]

I decided what I'd like to do with expirealert.com:

I'd like to start a service, where people can come to the site, create accounts, and add domains to be monitored. They can set up certain alerts, such as:

- If the domain expires
- If the domain is about to expire
- If the domain name expire date is changed (extended)
- If the domain name is registered (if at the time it isn't registered)
- If the domain name is put up for sale (some kind of spider that checks the content of a site daily).

I'd like to make atleast $5/day off this site (not much as you can see). If I can do this with just google, then I might not charge for a service like this. Otherwise, I was thinking of allowing free personal accounts, but charge for commercial use .... or to just allow 10 free credits to any account (so that ten domains can be monitored), but then a person has to purchase credits to monitor more names. What does everyone think? If I charged for the service, it would be cheap. 10 cents/credit or something ridiculous. Like I said, I'm looking to make $5/day off this site.

Any ideas/input would be appreciated.

Regards,

Matt

 

[manlymatt83]

Would it be legal for me to allow people to enter their dotster, namepros usernames/passwords as a one time thing, and my site will automatically "pull" the domain names they have in their account into my site.

Is that legal?

 

[armstrong]

I don't know about legality, but domainers are a paranoid lot. Even if you offer that feature, I doubt many would be willing to give you direct access to their registrar accounts. Just provide a form for people to bulk-submit their domains, and that would suffice.

 

[manlymatt83]

Layout

Alright all ... i got a modified layout from oswd.org.

http://www.expirealert.com

Whats everyone think? If you type some bs info into the username and password fields, it'll bring you to the initial logged in page. The main page will show you your alerts which will be able to be organized into "folders", which will be icons at the top of the page. The My account page will just show some basic info.

Whats everyone think so far?

 

[StudioWorks]

Looks good but there is room for a little more improvement.

I see that you mainly use CSS in your layout but you also use some tables. Would be great if you would only use CSS...

Looks good tho, i like it.

 

[.X.]

Looks nice! Nice relaxed design.The colors flow well,I like it.

 

[manlymatt83]

Updates and Questions (please read)

Hi all,

Been working on expirealert.com. Account creation works, I am working on the alert creation part now (thats hard coded).

Anyway, I had a question for those more technical registrar people.

If I do a whois on a domain, the top part of the whois is always the same. Lets take expirealert.com, for example.

Domain Name: EXPIREALERT.COM
Registrar: ENOM, INC.
Whois Server: whois.enom.com
Referral URL: http://www.enom.com
Name Server: NS0.XNAME.ORG
Name Server: NS1.ATOPIA.NET
Name Server: NS1.XNAME.ORG
Status: ACTIVE
Updated Date: 10-may-2005
Creation Date: 05-may-2005
Expiration Date: 05-may-2006

That information always shows no matter what domain you query. I assume that is because the first part is queried via Internic's internal whois server, and displays basic information (and the nameservers, etc. are probably out dated or behind a day or two, so I'd want to use this data only to pull the correct whois server).

Once I have the whois server (in this case, whois.enom.com), I do a query to that server directly. Data is always returned, but never in the correct format. So far I've written data to parse dotster and networksolutions, and I've made each of them "templates" that I use.

A search on google showed me that there are about 300+ registrars out there, new ones added every day. My idea is that I will make templates for all of them (unless someone can tell me a why that I can get the information from all the registrars in a standard format, if they release it as such).

My question is .... should I allow people to add domains to their domain list ("Domains I own", "Domains I'm watching") but only allow them to create alerts on the domain IF we have a template that supports the data retrieval? Or should I do something different? Its obviously going to take me a long time to write templates to support all registrars, with new ones every day, although some registrars are resellers so they use the same "return format" of data.

Any ideas on this would be appreciated.

Regards,

Matt

 

[Dave_Z]

If I do a whois on a domain, the top part of the whois is always the same. Lets take expirealert.com, for example.

Domain Name: EXPIREALERT.COM
Registrar: ENOM, INC.
Whois Server: whois.enom.com
Referral URL: http://www.enom.com
Name Server: NS0.XNAME.ORG
Name Server: NS1.ATOPIA.NET
Name Server: NS1.XNAME.ORG
Status: ACTIVE
Updated Date: 10-may-2005
Creation Date: 05-may-2005
Expiration Date: 05-may-2006

That information always shows no matter what domain you query. I assume that is because the first part is queried via Internic's internal whois server, and displays basic information (and the nameservers, etc. are probably out dated or behind a day or two, so I'd want to use this data only to pull the correct whois server).

Once I have the whois server (in this case, whois.enom.com), I do a query to that server directly. Data is always returned, but never in the correct format. So far I've written data to parse dotster and networksolutions, and I've made each of them "templates" that I use.

A search on google showed me that there are about 300+ registrars out there, new ones added every day. My idea is that I will make templates for all of them (unless someone can tell me a why that I can get the information from all the registrars in a standard format, if they release it as such).

My question is .... should I allow people to add domains to their domain list ("Domains I own", "Domains I'm watching") but only allow them to create alerts on the domain IF we have a template that supports the data retrieval? Or should I do something different? Its obviously going to take me a long time to write templates to support all registrars, with new ones every day, although some registrars are resellers so they use the same "return format" of data.

Any ideas on this would be appreciated.

Regards,

Matt

I don't see why not. Whois.sc, for example, has a monitoring and alert service
of sorts that does what you mentioned.

For .com and .net domains, assuming what you said actually pulls the results
from the registry, note that verisign currently uses the "thin" format: it shows
only the dates, the sponsoring registrar, its status, and its nameservers.

Sometime in the next few months, they'll finally enable .com and .net domains
to have auth codes. Not sure if they'll use the "thick" registry format like the
.org, .biz, and. info registries do.

Here's a link giving more detail on the subject:

http://www.verisign.com/Resources/N...gistrar_Connections/page_028565.html#01000005

Click on the COM and NET EPP Migration Update link to read the material.

Hope this helps! But I like what you're doing, keep at it!

 

[manlymatt83]

Re:

Saw that article....

So are you saying that whois results done from a command prompt will be displayed differently at that time?

Should I program my scripts to parse raw whois data from each indvidual whois server, or will there be an easier way in the future?

What do you mean by the "auth codes"? As in image authentication, meaning the data wont be able to be pulled "automatically" ?

If this is the case, maybe I should just start my service by monitoring expiration date, nameserver changes, registrar changes, and status changes, since that is always available and easily parsed (its all in the same format).



Also,

I'm debating how I should make some money off of this service. I decided to charge $1/credit. 1 credit is good for one domain monitoring for one month. Sounds expensive, huh? The thing is ... I'm making it SO easy to get free credits.... such as, refer a friend and get three credits, and I'll have public promotion codes like FREE12 that anyone can apply to their account at any time and get 12 free credits (of course a one time shot).... so most people will only end up buying credits if they want to monitor a large amount of domain names or dont feel like shopping around for free credit codes.

Is this too expensive? Should I lower it to 50 cents/credit but make it harder to get free ones?

Thanks for your help on both of these questions,



Matt

---added---

Actually, now that I've seen whois.sc, I'm thinking that I should either make credits 25 cents, or make the service completely free and just make money off of advertising??? It seems if I charge for it, people will just use whois.sc instead .... unless people come to expirealert without knowing about whois.sc ...

hmmm, tough call.

 

[primacomputer]

A few points that might help. You won't manage directly querying the whois database for long. I have a similar system to what you are planning on building, and just to monitor the names I'm interested in would required 50k+ queries. You're only allowed something like 20 queries per minute with most extensions. After that they blacklist your IP for a certain period. It would take you days to finish all the names on a reasonable sized list and by that time the information would be days old.

You probably also want to offer some sort of keyword matching system. People generally have a limited number of actual names they are waiting for. What they are looking for is good names that contain a specific keyword. This is another area querying the whois servers falls down.

As for dealing with the various whois formats you should forget about “templates” and go for some sort of patern matching if you feel the need to dig into the registrars data. But why do you need to dig into that anyway?

I don't think anyone is going to want to have you logging into their accounts to check names. Even if they did, the liability you open your self up to simply makes the idea insane.

I also think the $1/domain/month is way over the top. There are a few things to consider. People who have any real money already have this service, more likely a much more comprehensive one. People who only want to monitor a few names can do it manually, or with some free software. This leaves people who want to monitor a lot of names and have little money. You need to improve your feature set, and get the price down to cents a name at most. You're competing with software that offers many more features and monitors unlimited names for a $49.95 on off fee.

 

[manlymatt83]

Re:

Hi,

Thanks for your input. Not sure where I recommended I would login to people's accounts? Or was that just a suggestion on your part?

As far as the price, I agree with you. But I would need to atleast make enough money to break even, thats really all I care about. I dont know of a database I could query that would give domain information...

Also, you are limited to 20 queries per minute, but only to a specific whois server. Chances are, I could get about 1 query a second going because half of the domains will be from different registrars, and once I do the intial sign up query to get the registrar, I can query the registrars directly, no?

If I write a template system to parse whois data, I wont have any costs involved. Therefore, I could offer the service for a reasonable price, if not free.... or maybe 10 cents per credit, which would mean 10 domains for a month would be a dollar.

What do you think?

-Matt

 

[primacomputer]

Thanks for your input. Not sure where I recommended I would login to people's accounts? Or was that just a suggestion on your part?

I was referring to your idea of pulling names from dotster, namepros, etc. Too much risk.

As far as the price, I agree with you. But I would need to atleast make enough money to break even, thats really all I care about. I dont know of a database I could query that would give domain information...

At $1/month/name you only need to query a few names to reach your goal. But I really think you will have to get it down to cents, or less. This is just based on what I monitor and what I pay. Perhaps others are willing to pay a lot more. If so I'll be slapping a web interface on my system and pimping it 24 hours after you made you first months profit

Also, you are limited to 20 queries per minute, but only to a specific whois server. Chances are, I could get about 1 query a second going because half of the domains will be from different registrars, and once I do the intial sign up query to get the registrar, I can query the registrars directly, no?

You can distribute your queries to try to work around query:time limitations, in fact I've written something to do that. The problem is that with all the .net and .com queries you are going to end up hammering internic.net for every single one. They will cut you off.

Even without that, names aren't going to be spread evenly over 100 registrars. You're going to have the bulk of them in 10 or so. So lets say you can do a query a second. What sort of time period is someone willing to wait for their email of these drops? At 3600 queries and hour you aren't going to go through a lot before it's old news. At $1/name/month that's good money. At $0.01/name/month you barely cover your hosting charges.

If I write a template system to parse whois data, I wont have any costs involved. Therefore, I could offer the service for a reasonable price, if not free.... or maybe 10 cents per credit, which would mean 10 domains for a month would be a dollar.

I think you should only dig into whois as a last resort. Even if you use whois as your only source of data you should optimize it. There are many ways to do this. You don't need to query each name every day, only when an event has happened such as the expiration date. This effectively multiplies the number of queries you can do per day by 365. That should be enough to let you watch well over 100,000 names.

 

[manlymatt83]

Sounds good.

I'll do an initial query to get the initial expiration date, registrar, and name server data. Once i have the registrar stored, I can query that registrar itself all the time.

i'll have a daemon constantly running which will keep internal counters of each registrar so I know it wont ever go over more than 10 per minute. Internic itself will only need to be queried initially. After that I can parse registrar data directly.

I'll make the price 10 cents/domain. For 100 credits it will be $10 which will cover 10 domains for 10 months or 100 domains for one month. Phone alerts will cost 10 credits (this is where you'll receive a phone call).

My hosting costs are zilch. I work at an ISP.

Thanks again for your advice,

Matt

 

[armstrong]

You don't need to query each name every day, only when an event has happened such as the expiration date.

Webmasters would want to monitor their own domains for unauthorized whois changes, which of course can happen anytime. If expirealert doesn't do at least a daily query, then such changes won't get reported in time.

 

[Fork]

I havent read through all the posts in this thread so forgive me if the following has already been mentioned:

If I were you, I wouldnt go with the credit system allowing people to get the first few free. If you offer 10 free credits for 10 domains to be monitored, one could easily sign up for a new account and get 10 more free.. you would never make money. Two alternatives/solutions come to my mind at the moment. Either make the site completely subscription based in that every domain you add you must pay a monitoring fee ($1/mo or something cheap). Or you could offer a limited free service and charge for the full service. Such as a free service offering monthly reports or reporting only certain information while the paid service would offer weekly reports with all the information you could ask for.

In my opinion, I would go with option number two. You would most likely attract more users with the initial free service and get more subscriptions in the end. Upfront paid services seem to scare off the cheapskates like myself so a little freebie to pull them in is always nice. Secondly because I could use a nice free service like this :hehe:

My $.02 :D

 

[manlymatt83]

Agreed. I'm going to do one query per day, and they will run mostly at night. 10 queries per minute will allow 3600 per day. I can probably push these up to 10,000 per day because these wont all be internic queries ... only the intial query will be internic, then it will query the specific registrar (until a change occurs of course). That means my service will be able to monitor 10,000 domain names before I'll need to do some upgrading ..... I've got a bunch of IP's at work I could steal, atleast 20 of them. I could send the queries from different LANs which would allow me to query much more often.

 

[Fork]

FYI, I edited my post above so you might want to re-read for every bit of info

Out of curiosity, how do you plan to retrieve the domain information? I am interested in monitoring a few domains and am new to this domain game and tools involved.

 

[manlymatt83]

Thats the thing .... I dont intend to make a lot of money from this service... thats where i'd like to be different.

The site policy will be that there are no multiple accounts, and if y ou sign up for more than one and we notice we will shut down all accounts. Agreed though, someone could just make up a bunch of names and have 15 different accounts and when an account runs out of credits it is ignored. Maybe I should work around the credits ... thing is, I wanted to make it easy for people to gain free credits ...

Maybe I will start accounts off with 0 credits. I will allow you to list domains in the two categories I am offering ... "Domains I own" and "Domains I'm watching". When you list a domain, it will automatically grab the registrar, the creation date, and the expiration date. The data will never be checked again, you will just be notified when the expiration date is about to be reached, and when it is reached. And you can only get email messages, the option to receive a phone call wont be available. There will also be google ads on the right hand side of every page (as you see now at expirealert.com)

Then I can have another service that will allow you to monitor all domains daily, and you will be notified if anything changes. Unlimited domains, no advertisements on the right hand side, etc. And the abillity to get an alert by phone call (I have two people who will handle this daily, one in the evening and one during the day if it gets busy enough).

Should I offer a gold service too? Or should I Just make it 25 cents/domain/month if you upgrade, that way if you just want to monitor one domain specifically (its really important to you, etc.) it will just cost you $2.50 for a year?

Or maybe I could just offer the free service, and then unlimited paid service (which gives you every single feature imaginable) for $4.99/month, and offer some discount codes on the web (for instance, all over namepros forums, etc.) which give you free months, $1 off, etc.... and if you refer a friend AND they sign up for the paid service you'll gett a month free, etc. That way there are no credits, its just a flat fee ...

What do you all think?

 

[manlymatt83]

hmm ....

TERMS OF USE: You are not authorized to access or query our Whois
database through the use of electronic processes that are high-volume and
automated except as reasonably necessary to register domain names or
modify existing registrations.

Does that mean that i can't query the whois database for this service legally?

 

[armstrong]

It means that the workarounds you are proposing are just that - workarounds. If they wise up to your activities, they could cite that as a reason, then block your IP range from making further whois queries.

10 queries per minute will allow 3600 per day

How hard would it be for them to have a daily report on IP's that exceeded a certain threshhold? If I were running a whois server, any IP making more than 100 queries in a day would be suspect. If this goes on day after day, I'd block that IP within a week.

 

[Domainut]

Just write a few simple scripts and it's easy