- Cyger Selects
- Posts
- Issue #25: October 20, 2025
Issue #25: October 20, 2025
High velocity domain roots; Finally, the .com; Tech talk; The flip; 11-hour flight
Michael Cyger
October 20, 2025
Hi there, Too many stories to fit into this week's newsletter. Stay tuned next Monday too; maybe it'll be a quiet week and I'll be able to highlight more then. Here are the most interesting 5️⃣ domain tweets from last week. Have a great week, Mike P.S. I publish my best posts and opinions in Cyger Says every Friday morning. #1️⃣ High velocity domain roots
We looked at three years of domain sales on atom.com to see which root words sold the most. It’s a simple list, but it says a lot about how naming trends and founder priorities are shifting 👇 
How much would it take for you to pull this post down now that I’ve screenshotted it? 🤣
Darpan and I came to a legally binding agreement so I expect this post to be deleted soon. Get it while you can. 🤣 Also, click on the first post as the thread has more detail you'll want to read. #2️⃣ Finally, the .com
After a 4-year chase and a bidding war, deBridge has found its rightful home at debridge.com. Here's how it went down. After raising our $5.5M seed in 2021, I tried to buy debridge.com through DomainAgents, losing bids on $10K, $25K, $50K...in the end we settled for a dot finance domain, like many early stage projects. Every offer we made was declined by the owner, someone in the US who had registered it back in 2008. I even tried reaching out directly, and got zero response. Just in case the owner forgot to renew it, I set a Google Calendar reminder to check the expiration date every year,. Every year the reminder popped up. Every year he renewed it. After 4 years I kind of stopped paying attention, but this year when the reminder popped up, this time the domain wasn’t renewed. Winning the auction We immediately started researching how domain expirations and auctions work. Turns out, it’s not simple! Expired domains go through multiple stages: grace period, redemption, backorder. But eventually we hit an auction on this old-school site, NameJet. To even participate, you have to verify your account manually, go through KYC by phone, and figure out how to fund your bids (the card limit on their site was just $15K). After the expiration grace period, the auction finally went live. We placed a backorder, waited for the start, and then the real battle began. There were over 40 bidders! Every bid extended the timer by 5 minutes, so the auction stretched late into the night. It became a mini war, I’d raise the bid, someone would instantly counter. It went like that for hours. Finally, after dozens of rounds, our bid of $50,999 held as the final one. That was it — after four years, we’d finally won debridge.com. After aaaall that, the payment failed because of their outdated system, and the email said if we didn’t pay within 24 hours, the domain would be forfeited.😂 So we jumped on calls with their support, figured out a wire transfer, and finally — it was done! Say hello to our new home at debridge.com⚡️ 
Fun story of a founder persevering and getting the domain he always wanted. I thought end users didn't know about the secret sites we use to buy domain names at wholesale? #3️⃣ Tech talk
You can manage up to 5000 domains at a time with the Dynadot control panel. It took significant engineering effort to make this work. Each TLD registry has slightly different APIs, rate limits, and error codes. For those of you that need to manage even more than 5000 domains at a time, we have an amazing API. 
I've recently been building something (shocker) that requires thousands of rows in the browser client's DOM (Document Object Model), which can be a pain to deal with. Your takeaway: Dynadot cares about larger domain name investors and is spending the time to get this right before they grow even bigger. #4️⃣ The flip
This is the quality of SAV. They failed to renew the name, spent 6 weeks pretending to help me recover, said I had to add credit to redeem, apologised that their system was not allowing credit, said they were going to help…. And then they message to say it has left @usesav and I have to get in the drops 😂. Total joke by @usesavHelp 
Unfortunately, not all registrars are big enough and have the budget/staff to invest in their tech stack like Dynadot. Sav is a smaller registrar. I like their simple, cost-effective drop catch service and use it for .com domains I want but I know I won't have to fight anyone for. I use their drop catch service instead of building something myself using an API from Dynadot or GoDaddy. And it works. But I also transfer my domains out of Sav to GoDaddy after the 60-day day lock expires. We all need to figure out processes that work for us. Just making you aware. 🤣 11-hour flight This was funny. Kudos to you, Youssef, for putting it together. I'm in row 2 with Andrew Rosener. Lots of big personalities in some of these rows. And I know a bunch of them. I'd always enjoy sitting next to Drew. But I'd also really like to hear the story of Tony (row 7) or Swetha (row 10). Where would you sit?
|
Built with Insider.email