Dropcatching Explained: How Backorders Win the 5-Day Drop

Dropcatch is the practice of registering a domain in the first fraction of a second after the registry deletes it. A backorder is you paying someone to try. This guide is how the race works, who wins it, what the services actually promise, and what to check before you put money down. We run a directory of already-dropped domains, so we sit downstream of all of this and have no backorder to sell you.

What is the drop, and why is it a race?

A gTLD domain does not become available the day it expires. It goes through a grace period, then a 30-day redemption period, then five days of pending delete, and only then does the registry purge it. The complete guide to expired domains lays out that timeline with the policy text. The part that matters here is the last stage.

ICANN's Expired Registration Recovery Policy requires every gTLD registry to run a redemption grace period "of 30 days immediately following the deletion of a registration". After that, the .com Registry Agreement says "the current length of this Pending Delete Period is five calendar days". During those five days nobody can register the name and nobody can restore it. The status you see in an RDAP lookup is pendingDelete, defined in RFC 3915.

At the end of day five, the registry deletes the name in a batch. From that moment it is first come, first served at the ordinary registration price. Anyone who wants it has one chance, and everyone who wants it gets the same chance at the same instant. That is the race.

The best public description of the .com batch is in Game of Registrars, a 2017 USENIX Security paper by Lauinger and colleagues that measured the drop from the outside. Their account: "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." Verisign publishes a list to its registrars of names that just entered pending delete, so every catcher knows five days in advance which names are coming and roughly when.

For .org the same paper found the drop is much tighter: "over 50% of re-registrations on the deletion day occur during only 30 s".

How do dropcatchers actually work?

Registries accept registration requests only from accredited registrars, and they rate-limit each registrar's connection. So a single registrar can fire only so many create commands per second at the registry. A dropcatcher's answer is to be many registrars at once.

That is not a metaphor. IANA's registrar ID list contains, as of September 2026, roughly 1,500 entries named "DropCatch.com" followed by a number and "LLC". Each is a separate ICANN accreditation with its own rate limit. Dynadot has a couple of dozen. The USENIX paper counted the ecosystem in early 2017 and 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 top three drop-catch services alone held three quarters of all accreditations.

The mechanics, in the paper's words: "Around the deletion window, drop-catch services flood the registry with registration requests, most of which can be expected to fail because the domain has either not been deleted yet, or it has already been re-registered by a competitor." They "attempt to reverse engineer the registry's deletion process" to guess the order, and "are said to use multiple (rate-limited) registrar access credentials and place their servers physically close to the registry's systems", which the authors compare to high-frequency trading.

So the race is between a few companies with hundreds of accreditations each and servers next to the registry. A person refreshing a registrar's search box at 2pm is not in it, and neither is a script running from a single registrar account. If a name has any obvious value, a catcher has it within the second. We see the aftermath in our own pipeline: names with strong link profiles almost never reach the free drop, and the ones that do usually got there because the catchers' filters missed something the crawl data caught.

What does a backorder buy?

A backorder is a standing instruction to a catcher: if this name ever drops, try to register it for me. It is not a purchase and it is not a reservation. The catcher does not control the domain when you place the order, so it cannot promise delivery. The USENIX authors put it flatly: drop-catch services "cannot guarantee that they will be able to obtain it".

Two things happen after a successful catch. If you were the only customer who backordered the name, you get it for the backorder fee. If more than one customer ordered it, the catcher runs a private auction among them, "typically determined in a three-day private auction" in the paper's description, and the highest bidder gets the name. Popular names almost always go to auction, which means a backorder on a good name is really an entry ticket to a bidding contest.

The services, in brief. DropCatch is the largest by accreditation count and runs backorders and auctions on the names it catches. Dynadot says "Placing a backorder request is free. You only pay if we successfully catch the domain", and "If multiple users backorder the same domain, it enters a backorder auction where all eligible Dynadot users can place bids". SnapNames and NameJet are the older pair, tied to registrar partners that feed them expiring inventory. GoDaddy sells backorders on names it does not hold as well as running its own expiry auctions for names in its portfolio. Namecheap offers backorders too. Read the terms on each site before ordering; the auction rules and fees differ.

Keep one distinction straight. A registrar expiry auction (GoDaddy Auctions is the best-known) sells names during the grace period, before they are deleted. The name never drops and the registration continues unbroken. A backorder is for names that will actually reach pending delete and be purged. The first is a resale. The second is a bet on the race.

The .au drop is a different animal

Country-code registries set their own rules. Australia's is the clearest example of a short, scheduled release.

Under auDA's .au Licensing Rules, a lapsed licence can be renewed "within 30 calendar days from the Licence expiry date", after which "the Domain Name will become available to the public on a First Come, First Served basis". No redemption period, no pending delete. The registry publishes the names due for release and lets them go at a set time each day.

drop.com.au is the established catcher for that release. Its page says "The auction closes at 11:30 AM (AEST and AEDT Melbourne/Sydney) every day", "Bidding starts at just $25 and all successful bids also include a 1 year domain registration", and it runs a "No Catch No Pay" policy: "if we don't catch your domain then you don't pay the winning auction bid". Other ccTLDs have their own versions; .uk, .de and .nl each have a distinct expiry cycle and their own catchers. Check the registry's policy page before assuming the .com timeline applies.

What are the success rates?

Nobody publishes a per-service catch rate we can verify, and we are not going to make one up. What is measurable is the shape of the market.

The USENIX data say that catchers as a group make more than 80% of all registration attempts and win under 10% of successful registrations. Most of their attempts fail, because most attempts are for names that either have not dropped yet or were taken a few milliseconds earlier. About 10% of all deleted .com domains were re-registered on the same day they dropped. The other 90% went to nobody in the first 24 hours. Those are the names that end up on free drop lists and in directories like ours.

Read it this way. If a name is contested, some catcher will get it, and the odds that it is your catcher depend on how many accreditations they hold and where their servers sit. Then you face the auction. If a name is not contested, you probably did not need a backorder at all. It will still be there the next morning at the standard registration price, which is how every domain in our directory got listed.

The paper's authors also looked at what happened to caught names afterwards, and in their sample "most re-registered drop-catch domains contain nothing but advertisements and parking pages". Most catches are speculation, not building. Remember that when a backorder auction climbs past what a sensible person would pay: you are usually bidding against someone who plans to park it.

What should you check before backordering?

The backorder fee is small. The auction is not, and catching a name with an ugly past costs more than either, because you find out after you own it.

So do the history first. Run the name through the expired domain checker to see when it was first archived, how many snapshots exist and what the site was about in each period, then open the Wayback Machine and click through a few years yourself. We screen every listing this way and the most common failure is a domain that ran a real site for a decade and then spent its last 18 months as a casino affiliate. That reputation transfers with the name.

The links take longer and matter more. Pull the referring domains with the backlink checker and read them as names, not as a count. Open a handful of the linking pages and decide whether a person placed the link or a script did. The guide on evaluating an expired domain's link history goes through this properly. The domain authority checker is a sort key at best, and we would not bid on a number.

Fit is the check people skip. Google's spam policies cover expired domain abuse, and the test is whether what you build on the name matches what the name was. A caught domain whose history has nothing to do with your plan is a name at auction prices, and a bad one to win.

You have time for all of this. ExpiredDomains.net publishes pending-delete names with drop dates across most TLDs, so a name shows up there five days before it drops. Five days is plenty.

What Revised is and isn't

We are a directory. Every listing is a domain that already went through the drop, that nobody caught, that has referring domains we verified, and that has had its archive screened. We show the date we last confirmed it was still available.

We do not catch domains, we do not hold them, we do not register them for you and we do not run backorders. When you reveal a name, you register it yourself at any registrar for that registrar's price. If someone got there first, the availability stamp will be the first place that shows.

That makes us the place for the 90% of drops that catchers ignore rather than the 10% they fight over. If you want a name with real history that is available right now, browse the directory of expired domains with backlinks. Filter by TLD, including .com.au, or by who links to them, read the archive timeline, and reveal a name once the evidence stacks up.

FAQ

What does dropcatch mean? Dropcatching is registering a domain in the instant the registry deletes it at the end of the pending-delete period. Specialist services do it with hundreds of registrar accreditations and servers near the registry. A backorder is your instruction to one of those services to try on your behalf.

How do I backorder a domain? Place a backorder with a catcher such as DropCatch, Dynadot, GoDaddy, SnapNames or NameJet before the domain drops. If the service catches it and you were the only bidder, you pay the backorder fee. If several customers ordered it, the name goes to a private auction among them.

How long does pending delete last? Five calendar days for .com and .net under the registry agreement, after the 30-day redemption period. Verisign then deletes the name in a daily batch that starts around 2pm Eastern. Other registries run their own schedules.

Is a GoDaddy backorder guaranteed? No backorder from any service is guaranteed. The service does not control the domain and competes against other catchers at the moment of deletion. Most services charge only on success, and most contested names go to auction after the catch.

Can I catch a dropping domain myself? Only by luck. Registries rate-limit each registrar, and the large catchers each hold hundreds of accreditations. For a name nobody else wants, you can register it at any registrar the day after it drops. For a name others want, a catcher will have it first.