irfan

PKNIC Domain Expiry Policy

A few months back, I was looking for some COOL .pk domain for my personal page. I was fortunate enough that I got a domain name of my choice and It was about to expire in a month. According to PKNIC policy, they hold the domain for 2 weeks after expiry period.

In the event of non-payment of domain maintenance fee by due date PKNIC in its sole discretion shall de-activate such un-paid domain and offer this expired domain to third party for re-registration on pre-payment on a first come first served basis, after a hold period of two weeks after domain de-activation. The defaulting domain owner can pay and re-activate the expired domain within the hold period. Ref: http://pk5.pknic.net.pk/pk5/pgPolicy.PK

I noted down the expected expiry date plus hold period. Luckily, domain was not renewed by then. I went to register this domain but I was told that you cannot register this domain until PKNIC releases it. This domain was registered after a month of expiry + hold period by someone else :( Recently, I found another cool domain name. This time the domain was expired in June :P but again not available for registration. I was told by one of the PKNIC partners that they release the domain whenever they want to :S I decided to calculate the average time of release for each domain. I collected the list of more than 5000 PREMIUM .PK DOMAIN NAMES and wrote down a script to check their status. The results were totally random :S. PKNIC decides fate of each domain individually. There is a domain which was expired in September 2008 but it is still not available. Please check the status of lit.com.pk

Solution:

PKNIC is not going to respond to our emails and phone calls. I have written down a script which keeps on checking the status of my favorite domains and emails me when they are available ;) Feel free to use the script: http://pknicnotifier.appspot.com/