Of all people, Gobala Krishnan forgets to renew his blog’s domain name at http://www.gobalakrishnan.com/ and as it appears, the domain has expired on 14 March 08 and now redirected to Godaddy’s domain parking page.

A similar incident happened to Advertlets.com, a Malaysian own online advertising company which had its domain expired on January 3, 2008. The case attracted quite an attention as it involved thousands of publishers who sell advertising space via Advertlets.com system.

Anyway back to Gobala, he is a great Internet marketer and one can only wonder how he could end up having one of his important domain names expires. But I understand that he was probably just too busy with other important projects which could easily steal a considerable amount of his time.

He was recently given the privilege to grace the front page of Tech&U over at New Straits Times. You know you’ve reached a certain status level when the national newspaper wants to feature you on their front page, so more power to him!

Anyway talking about expiring domain names, there’s a chance that you’ll never get it back. Your competitors may use this opportunity to seize that domain name via backordering and snap it up the instant it becomes available and use it as they wish once they own it.

Backorder is a service that attempts to register an expired domain name on behalf of an entity before someone else grabs it. With over 750,000 domains expire every month you can imagine there exist an opportunity to make money instantly when one can get hold of a hot, high PageRank and high traffic domain name.

Of course there would be legal repercussions in some cases but I imagined the Malaysian’s cyber law hasn’t catch up with this thing yet – correct me if I’m wrong. Any such case will be a watershed once it’s initiated.

By the way, backordering has helped me got a hold on Sabahan.com. In my case though the owner let it expired and I was the first to grab it and became the proud owner in less than one second it became available.

Currently, I am monitoring twelve or so other domain names. None of them are copyrighted of course or belongs to a particular person who has build up his brand around that domain name.

If you don’t want to end up having your important domain names expire, I suggest you register them for at least 2 years in advance. Important domains should be registered 5 years or longer in advance. Also be sure to pay attention to the domain name renewal notice sent by your domain name registrar.