Domain Backorder vs Dropcatch vs Expired Domain Directory: Which Gets You the Domain

There are five ways to end up holding a domain someone else let expire. Bid at the registrar's expiry auction before it deletes. Backorder it with a dropcatcher and hope they win the race when it drops. Watch the registry's drop list and try to catch it yourself. Buy it from whoever already caught it. Or pick a name that dropped, that nobody caught, and register it at any registrar for the normal price.

These get confused with each other constantly. The same companies sell several of them, and the word "backorder" gets used for all five, sometimes on the same page. This guide separates them. For the mechanics of the drop itself, the dropcatching guide goes deeper. For the timeline that produces the drop, see what happens when a domain expires. And one thing up front, since it decides which of the five we are: Revised does not backorder, register or hold anything. We list expired domains that are available to register today. You register them yourself.

What is a domain backorder?

A standing instruction to a dropcatching service: if this name drops, try to register it for me.

It is not a purchase. It is not a reservation either, whatever the checkout page implies. The service does not control the name when you order, so it cannot promise delivery. Dynadot's backorder page puts it plainly: "Placing a backorder request is free. You only pay if we successfully catch the domain." And "No, a backorder doesn't guarantee" the domain, because the catcher is racing every other catcher at the moment of deletion.

Two things can happen after a catch. If you were the only customer who wanted the name, you pay the backorder fee and it lands in your account. If several customers backordered it, the service runs a private auction among them. Dynadot again: "If multiple users backorder the same domain, it enters a backorder auction where all eligible Dynadot users can place bids." The first person to have placed the backorder gets the opening bid. So on any name worth having, a backorder is an entry ticket to an auction. The fee is not the price.

The services differ in fee, auction rules and how many registrar accreditations they bring to the race. DropCatch is the largest by accreditation count; IANA's registrar ID list shows roughly 1,500 numbered DropCatch.com entities. Dynadot runs backorders through its own registrar and a couple of dozen accreditations. SnapNames and NameJet are the older pair, with partner registrars feeding them expiring inventory. GoDaddy sells backorders for names it does not hold as a yearly credit, separately from its expiry auctions. Namecheap has a backorder product too. Read the terms on each before ordering. What happens to your fee when they miss, and whether a successful catch on a contested name commits you to an auction you did not mean to enter, are the two clauses people skip and regret. Nobody publishes a per-service catch rate we can verify, so I cannot tell you which catcher wins most often, only that the paper below shows how lopsided the race is.

Is a GoDaddy backorder the same as a GoDaddy auction?

No. If you take one thing from this page, take this distinction.

A registrar expiry auction sells names during the grace period, before deletion. GoDaddy Auctions, Namecheap's marketplace and Dynadot's expired auctions all do this with names from their own customer base. If the auction gets a bid, the registrar renews the name and transfers it to the winner. The registration continues unbroken. The name never enters redemption, never reaches pending delete, never drops. ICANN's Expired Registration Recovery Policy allows this: the policy says registrars "may delete registrations at any time after they expire," and nothing in it stops them from renewing and transferring instead.

A backorder is for names that will actually be deleted and purged. After the 30-day redemption period and the 5-day pending delete that the .com Registry Agreement sets, the registry releases the name in a daily batch, and the catchers race. A GoDaddy backorder is GoDaddy entering that race on your behalf. A GoDaddy Auctions bid is you buying the name before the race ever starts.

So if a name is at a large registrar, look for it in that registrar's expiry auction first. If it is there and someone bids, no backorder anywhere will get it. It is not going to drop.

How do dropcatchers win the drop?

By being many registrars at once and sitting next to the registry.

Registries only accept registration commands from accredited registrars, and they rate-limit each one. A single registrar account can fire a limited number of create requests per second at the moment of the drop. The catchers' answer is to hold hundreds of accreditations. The clearest public measurement is Game of Registrars, a 2017 USENIX Security paper, which found that "drop-catch services control over 75% of accredited domain registrars and cause more than 80% of domain creation attempts, but represent at most 9.5% of successful domain creations." The same paper describes the Verisign drop: "Beginning each day at 2pm ET, Verisign's systems iterate over the 'dropping' domain names in a certain order and change their status from registered to available one by one, with the whole process lasting up to an hour."

What that means for you is that if a name is contested, some catcher gets it in the first second, and your odds depend on which catcher you chose and how many accreditations they hold. If a name is not contested, it was probably not caught at all. In the paper's data about 10% of deleted .com names were re-registered the day they dropped. The other 90% sat there.

That 90% is the point of this article, and it is a much bigger pile than the backorder industry's marketing suggests.

Can you catch a dropping domain yourself from the registry drop list?

You can try. For uncontested names you will succeed, and then you did not need to race.

Verisign tells its registrars which names have entered pending delete, so the drop list for .com is known five days ahead. Sites like ExpiredDomains.net republish it with metrics attached. For .au, the registry publishes the names due for release and drop.com.au republishes the daily drop list and takes backorders against it. auDA's .au Licensing Rules keep the .au version short. 30 days after expiry, "the Domain Name will become available to the public on a First Come, First Served basis." No redemption, no pending delete.

Watching the list and refreshing a registrar's search box at 2pm Eastern is not being in the race. A script running from a single registrar account is not in it either. Either method works for names nobody else wants, which is also the set of names that will still be there tomorrow at the standard price. For anything contested, the catchers have it before your request is parsed.

Which route gets you the domain?

It comes down to whether anyone else wants it.

Auctions and backorders are for names that other people want. That is what makes them contested and what sets the price. If you have a specific name in mind, you are on that path whether you like it or not, and the sensible order is: check the registrar's expiry auction, then place a backorder with a large catcher, then be ready for a private auction.

The directory route is for a different question. You do not have a name in mind. You want a domain with real referring domains and a clean archive to build on, in a subject area, in a TLD, and you would rather choose from what is available than fight for what is contested. The Revised directory is a set of names that already went through the drop, that nobody caught, that have referring domains we verified and archive history we screened, and that we last confirmed unregistered on the date shown on the listing. You reveal a name, then register it yourself at any registrar for that registrar's price. If someone got there first, the availability stamp is the first place that shows.

Whether that is the right route depends on what you are building. A launch that needs a specific brand name is an auction problem. A new site in an existing subject that would benefit from links a real site earned is a directory problem, and there are far more of those names than there are catchers interested in them.

What should you check before backordering or registering?

The same three things, whichever route you are on. The backorder fee is small. The auction price is not. And the cost of winning a name with an ugly past is worse than either, because you find out after you own it.

Run the name through the expired domain checker to see its current status, when it was first archived, how many snapshots the Wayback Machine holds and what the site was about in each era. Then open the Wayback Machine and click through a few years yourself. The most common failure we see in screening is a domain that ran a real site for a decade and then spent its last stretch as a casino affiliate. That reputation transfers with the name.

Pull the referring domains with the backlink checker and read them as a list of names. Open a few of the linking pages. A person placed the link, or a script did. Our guide to evaluating an expired domain's link history covers this properly. The domain authority checker is a sort key, not a verdict.

And check fit. Google's spam policies define expired domain abuse as a name that is "purchased and repurposed primarily to manipulate search rankings by hosting content that provides little to no value to users." A caught name whose history has nothing to do with your plan is a name at auction prices and a bad one to win.

FAQ

What is the difference between a domain backorder and dropcatching? Dropcatching is registering a name in the instant the registry releases it. A backorder is your instruction to a dropcatching service to try that for you. Most charge only on success, and if more than one customer ordered the same name they auction it among them.

Is a domain backorder guaranteed? No. The service does not control the name and competes with other catchers at the moment of deletion. A registrar expiry auction is the only route with a guaranteed outcome, because the name never drops.

Does Revised backorder domains? No. Revised does not backorder, catch, hold, register or sell domains. We list expired domains that have already dropped and are available to register now, with the referring domains and archive history we verified. You register the name yourself at any registrar.

What is an expired domain marketplace? Usually a site that resells names that were caught or bought at auction, at a markup. A directory is different: the names are not owned by anyone, and the fee is for the research and the reveal, not for the domain.

If you would rather choose from what is available than bid for what is contested, browse the directory of expired domains with backlinks. Filter by TLD, including .com.au, by authority or by what links to them, read the archive timeline, and register the name yourself once the evidence stacks up.