“Other than sheer luck, how do you know when a domain name like Facetime.com is transferred to another company?”

Although this question may have been more appropriate for DomainQuestions.com (hint, hint), I will answer it here because someone asked me this in response to my article about Apple’s acquisition of Facetime.com.

As I mentioned in my article, I can’t personally take credit for discovering the domain transfer, but my bet is that Mark was monitoring the domain name via the domain monitor tool at DomainTools.  With the tool, you can monitor the domain status, a registrar change, expiration date changes, and nameserver changes.

Access to the tool is given to customers with a DomainTools account, even the free accounts.  100 domain names can be monitored if you have a free account, and up to 10,000 domain names can be monitored with the professional account level.

I believe I’ve written about this tool before, but it’s a great tool to use to keep your eye on important domain names, either for your own portfolio, to monitor competitors, or for voyeuristic reasons.

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Please help me raise funds for the Ronald McDonald House

For quite some time, when you did a Whois lookup using DomainTools, you had the ability to click a little flag icon to monitor the domain name you were looking up. You could monitor for Whois changes, Nameserver changes, Registration changes, and maybe a few other things. Recently, I tried to monitor a domain name, and I couldn’t find the flag icon.

After a bit of searching this morning, I was able to find the URL to monitor domain names on DomainTools. You do need to have an account to monitor domain names, but it’s part of the package for Silver members.

I have been monitoring a wide variety of domain names, although my list hadn’t been updated in a while. I also keep an eye on domain names I own in addition to names I would like to own.

This is a handy tool that I am happy to learn has not been removed from DomainTools.  I just wish they would move it back to the standard Whois lookup console to make it easier – allowing me to monitor domain names on the fly rather than having to go to a separate URL.

At any given time, I am tracking the registration details for a considerable number of domain names. Most of these names are owned by my companies, and I follow them as a security precaution. Other domain names I follow are names I am interested in acquiring, and yet others are names I follow for other reasons. There are a whole host of reasons why it’s important to monitor domain names.

DomainTools has a good way to keep track of domain names you have an interest in monitoring. The Domain Monitor service is completely free, and it’s easy to sign up for alerts. All of your alerts will be emailed to you, so you can track a variety of changes as the happen.

Some of the things you can track:

• Ownership changes
• Registrar changes
• Expiration date updates
• DNS changes

If there are domain names you want to follow, sign up for free alerts on them pretty easily and quickly.