In 2010, Jerry Alex neglected to renew jerryalex.com, and woke up one day to find his website had turned into a squatter’s template, with a $1500 ransom. So he waited 9 years before pouncing on the drop.
I had given up hope of ever retrieving my personal domain name. Then, a few months ago, I got really lucky. … It went from a reseller to a popular domain auction where it sat waiting to be bid on. Generally, these auctions will drive up the price by bidding on their own domains to get you to pay more. For me, I felt that it was a good idea to avoid bidding all together. I didn’t want to encourage price gouging, so I decided to wait on the domain to make it look undesirable. Fortunately, my gamble paid off.
He had a good gameplan, but his domain-drop script only ran once every 10 minutes! A few years ago the domain might have been sniped within seconds by a bot slurping up every dropped .com that contains English words or common names. Fortunately the assumed value of whatever dot com seems to have fallen off a cliff.