I own a couple dozen domain names, and several happen to be registered with GoDaddy.
I don’t recommend using GoDaddy for valuable domains because of their eccentric founder, and their overzealous enforcement of DMCA complaints – which means they may forfeit your domain without substantial proof of infringement.
Also, GoDaddy is aggressive at spamming customers on a weekly basis with promotional upsell offers. And they telemarket you to upsell. And their website is ugly. And they guarantee only 99.9% network uptime. (You get the idea.)
Anyway, I decided to try the GoDaddy Backorder feature.
I already owned jebriggs.com, didn’t think it was likely that I would ever get briggs.com (lots of companies named that), but thought it would be an improvement to register jbriggs.com when available.
For $18.99 per domain name, GoDaddy promises to inform you of whois record changes, attempt to register an already-registered domain name when it expires for no additional charge for the first year.
So I “backordered” jbriggs.com last year.
jbriggs.com expired on April 6, 2007 and became available on July 24, 2007.
How well did GoDaddy Backorder perform? Not very. A domainer (squatter) was able to register it and point it at a parking page.
Fortunately, after apparently not making money in 5 days, the domain became available again and was automatically registered to me.
What’s really odd is that I received an alert email informing me that the nameservers for jbriggs.com were changed to godaddy servers, but I wasn’t explicitly notified that I had acquired the domain itself.
Update: I got the congratulations email about 20 hours after the domain was registered.