Domain gets parked (days 3 to 5-ish)

Somewhere after a few days, many registrars will "park" the domain by inserting new "domain parking" nameservers into the TLD zone for your domain.

You may recognize this when you see it; you may arrive at a web landing page that says something to the effect of, "This domain has expired." It may be peppered with pay-per-click ads, or there may be an offer to backorder the domain.

You may also notice when you look at the WHOIS record that the nameservers are no longer the "usual" nameservers for the domain, but have other names such as ns1.expireddomain.dom or ns2.expireddomain.dom.

Doing this ostensibly serves to alert end users and, hopefully, word will get back to somebody who is in a position to do something about it to renew the domain.

What is also happening is that the registrar is doing one or more of the following:

• Monetizing clicks
• Measuring traffic
• Running free ads for their own stuff
• Soliciting interest ahead of an auction of the domain

This is a critical window in the domain life cycle because it is at this point where the registrant's (yours) and the registrar's interests may have diverged. This is because if your domain is a good one (defined as being one or more of the following: old, generic, dictionary, popular, high-traffic, or heavily backlinked), then it may be worth more to your registrar if you neglect to renew this domain rather than if you renew it.

If you renew your domain, it's worth a few bucks to your registrar. If you forget to renew it and they can auction it for $10,000 or $100,000, well then, that's another matter entirely....