Dear OpenSRS Community, I just joined this list a few days ago in order to do some research on the domain name registration industry. My goal is to determine if it's even worth trying to start a business in this industry so late in the game. From what I've read so far, the industry is extremely saturated and domain name sales have decreased heavily due to the slowing of the economy. With that said, can a small business put up a relatively sophisticated site (something like Dotster functionality) and expect to make much money (goals of 1-3k per month eventually) ? Obviously a fair amount of marketing would need to be done via search engines, banner ad posting, and other means to build traffic and publicity. Until more funds are available, all operations of the company would have to be on a very small scale basis (me and my savings account), but the priority would be to have 24/7 redundancy and good customer service. What about expired and deleted domain compilation lists ? Considering that each registrar maintains their own database of zone files, I suspect that I would need to either brute force the WHOIS protocol for individual domain name checking or find a way to get the entire NSI registry ... which I do believe costs some serious dollars. The idea is to put a site up solely for expired domain renewals and lists in hopes to make a little cash. Are expired and deleted domain renewal sites explicitly frowned upon by the operators of the OpenSRS system ? I would suspect so considering the bandwidth requirements to check the 'expiration' status on an individual domain _every_ couple of seconds. This process sounds very similar to a denial of service attack, heh. Let me know your thoughts, flames, or advice. If a site could make me even $1-3k per month I would be happy. For the last 6 1/2 years I've been writing device drivers on a 1099 contract for companies all over the globe. As all of you know, the market is extremely dry right now for work, so I'm looking for anything that will help generate some revenue so that I can get out of this extremely hair-pulling industry (device drivers). Resources I have at my disposal right now: 1) 20Mbit bandwidth circuit at a 24/7 redundant co-locate facility. 2) 4 Dual processor pentium 3 machines with 1 gig of ram each. 3) Combined 200 gig of storage. 4) 10+ years of programming knowledge in x86 Assembly, 8051 Assembly, C/C++ and 3 years of perl/php. 5) Friend that can create quality graphic design work for cheap. Thanks Jeff Bevill
