For those of you who didn’t know, the .eu TLD was opened for public domain registrations on Friday 7th. I had wanted to get a hold of the rooke.eu domain as I’ve always wanted a Rooke domain. Looking at all of the other major TLDs proved useless as they are all registered for a good few years to come. The newly introduced .eu TLD was a chance to get a reasonable Rooke name.

I had been checking that the domain was available in the days running up to the “landrush” period beginning on the 7th over at the Whois.eu site. The domain was available right up until mid-morning. So I went to order it, however my usual registrar DynDNS weren’t offering .eu registrations at the time. So I tried another popular alternative, GoDaddy.com. I went through the registration steps and all went through fine. Another quick check, after a few failed connection attempts, on the whois database showed that the domain was available still. A later check showed that it had been registered.

So I thought I was safe in the knowledge that it had been registered. Unfortunately it appears that it wasn’t registered to myself - I hadn’t checked the ownership details at the time. The domain will have most likely been pre-registered by the owner with the pre-registrations occuring on the Friday morning on a first come first served basis. This led to the whois database providing intermittent service as the load on the servers grew.

As you can imagine, I really wish I’d pre-registered now! Oh well, I shall just have to hope that it’s only registered for one year and that the owner will loose interest or alternatively another new TLD will appear! For now my primary domain will remain sarzeau.net.