Tools and services for notifying when a domain becomes available

[Hashim]

Does anyone know of a good tool/service to notify you when a domain becomes available? I'm talking about domains that are not good enough to be dropcaught so will eventually become available, and you just want a notification to make sure you hand reg it before someone else eventually does. It should also support all existing TLDs or at least as many as possible. Feel free to recommend both free and paid.

 

[Eric Lyon]

Some free ones:
https://domainname.shop/domainwatch
https://uptimerobot.com/domain-expiration-monitoring/?ref=header

Additionally, here's an article by @Bob Hawkes on a free way to monitor domains: https://www.namepros.com/blog/free-...erent-ways-monitoring-can-be-helpful.1355189/

 

[Hashim]

I've been using Uptime Monitor for a while but its essentially useless for domain name availability, it monitors whether something can be found on a site rather than its WHOIS status, and even then it doesn't consider common domain name landers and parking pages to be websites so counts them as always offline. Essentially it will alert you when the domain no longer has content, usually when it reaches its expiry date, but since this is at least a month away from actual availability, and since actual availability for hand-regging a domain may or may never come, you still have to go through the process of manually checking each domain anyway. DomainWatch is far too limited with support for just Swedish and Norwegian ccTLDs.

Thanks for the link, I'll check out Bob's article when I get the chance.

 

[Hashim]

Sorry, I meant Uptime Robot.

 

[Eric Lyon]

Sorry, I meant Uptime Robot.

What about: https://littlewarden.com/

Pinger Man looks like it will let you monitor up to 3 domains for free: https://pingerman.com/monitoring/domain

Godaddy might also have a free domain monitoring feature: https://www.godaddy.com/help/set-up-domain-monitoring-579

 

[E. Silvera]

Godaddy might also have a free domain monitoring feature: https://www.godaddy.com/help/set-up-domain-monitoring-579

Ended, along with Domain Backorder, since October 2025.

 

[Eric Lyon]

Ended, along with Domain Backorder, since October 2025.

Thanks for the heads up. That's unfortunate :/

 

[Hashim]

Little Warden is a little pricey for me for only 20 URLs. I did find a completely free service yesterday that covers a huge amount of TLDs:

https://dnmin.com/supported-tlds

The only thing that worries me about that one is whether anyone running it can see/snipe my domains. I've sent an email to them asking what guarantees/measures they've got for this but haven't heard back yet. I wouldn't even mind paying a reasonable amount just to guarantee this doesn't happen, but at the same time it's not worth the £25 a month to me that Little Warden charge. I've used Pinger Man in the past but can't remember whether their DNS monitors cover availability, I'll have to contact them to find out as well as which TLDs they support and the privacy issues. Their prices definitely seem reasonable, since it seems you can pay based on how many monitors you want - $5 a month for 50 is not bad at all.

 

[E. Silvera]

I'll check out Bob's article when I get the chance.

I found the referred Dynadot's free monitoring tools to be interesting and useful.

 

[Hashim]

I found the referred Dynadot's free monitoring tools to be interesting and useful.

Thanks, I read it yesterday but then forgot about it. Does it allow you to keep track of all/most TLDs or just the ones that Dynadot supports for registration? Dynadot's supported list for domain restrictions is restricted for obvious reasons, but if their monitors are based on those same restrictions then it's a dealbreaker for me.

 

[Vertibox]

Little Warden is a little pricey for me for only 20 URLs. I did find a completely free service yesterday that covers a huge amount of TLDs:

https://dnmin.com/supported-tlds

The only thing that worries me about that one is whether anyone running it can see/snipe my domains. I've sent an email to them asking what guarantees/measures they've got for this but haven't heard back yet. I wouldn't even mind paying a reasonable amount just to guarantee this doesn't happen, but at the same time it's not worth the £25 a month to me that Little Warden charge. I've used Pinger Man in the past but can't remember whether their DNS monitors cover availability, I'll have to contact them to find out as well as which TLDs they support and the privacy issues. Their prices definitely seem reasonable, since it seems you can pay based on how many monitors you want - $5 a month for 50 is not bad at all.

This is my concern also. Anything that freely gives others your ideas or your data is to be avoided.
I am not sure if domain sniffing still goes on but given the colossal intricacies and complexity of software (plus the software that nobody really knows about), I wouldn't be surprised if this still goes on. Best to assume it does.

It is why I avoid all cloud services and all backup services and alleged domain appraisals (which are largely laughable). The people who run these services and their staff (who are all completely unknown to you) can do whatever they want with your data and you wouldn't know if/when any data was stolen/used/sold, or if you find out some of your data being used, identifying who was the original criminal would be impossible as well as futile. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.

In the past I have created email addresses which I subsequently did not use, at all. Not a single time.
Yet some time later, I would receive emails at those addresses.

I used to keep reminders for domains that I was interested in, in case they expired and became re-available, but as you can probably already realise, the good ones rarely are re-available and I am not at all interested in fighting in the murky, grubby and sometimes/often criminal world of domain auctions.

But auctions can yield good finds, because like anything else with humans, there is no pure black and white scenario where everything runs perfectly/error free and so some good names get missed by others, like the one you nabbed.
It just doesn't appeal to me to work that hard.