I just got confirmation today that I won an auction for a superb domain name – ben.me

It was the end of what seemed like a very long saga.

Back in June I first registered for the dot me “Landrush” at DomainMonster. This was basically a pre-launch where you could order the domain you wanted before full registration was opened.

If you ordered a domain and no-one else ordered it, the domain was yours when the dot me was finally released.

If more than one person ordered it, you were all entered into a closed auction – whoever bid the most won the domain.

So, you can go see what is currently being auctioned here: http://auctions.domain.me

However, even if you really want to join in and bid for a domain listed there, you can’t. The only participants are those people who pre-ordered the domains between 6th June and 26th June 2008.

On the 16th July I got confirmation that the domain was going to auction and that the 3 day auction was starting on the 5th August.

I figured that the auction was ending at 4pm on the 8th August so I would bid my max bid (a 4 figure sum) at 3.50pm that day – leaving any opposition with the least possible time to respond to my bid.

So that’s what I did – I bid at 3.50pm yesterday and then the auction refreshed and showed me as the high bidder.

Problem was, the auction was extended by 24 hours because of my last-minute bid.

I didn’t know that was going to happen, and it scuppered my plans just a little! I had wanted to bid at the very last minute to avoid anyone beating me or pushing up the price too much but the auctions were set to punish auction snipers by extending the time remaining.

As it happened, one of my competitors did try to outbid me yesterday and pushed the price up by another $80 or so but today at 4:54:11pm I got an email:

“Congratulation! You won your auction!”

Final price was just 36% of my max bid so whoever was bidding against me certainly did not value the prize as much as I did.

Back in February of this year I made several 4 figure offers for a different “ben dot” domain with a pretty poor extension but the seller did not acknowledge my offers.

How glad I am that he didn’t as it forced me to act on the dot me landrush – and now I’ve got a great domain to use!

Not sure what I’ll use it for at the moment, apart from a pretty easy-to-remember email address. A blog perhaps?