Before the current issue of Business 2.0, very few people had heard of Kevin Ham. And yet he is a giant among domainers. His domain enterprises generate approximately $70 million a year and he holds a portfolio of roughly 300,000 domain names. Still, it’s what many do not know about this man that may interest domainers the most.

Like many in this field, Kevin, originally a family doctor, had no idea that domaining would become his career. Having achieved initial success with a webhost directory (originally a part-time venture), Kevin started offering domain registration services and provided his clients with lists of available domain names. At the the time of the dot com bust, thousands upon thousands of registered domain names were not being renewed. That was good news for Kevin's domain list business, but made it difficult to keep track of things manually. So he built a better mousetrap.

Network Solutions, the sole retail registrar of .com domains at the time, published a root zone file twice daily. This file contained approximately 5 million names and did not show when domains would be expiring. Kevin soon found a way to turn this list into a list of domain names that would soon be available. He wrote a script to compare the current lists contents to the previous one. He determined that names that disappeared from the list would become available 5 to 6 days later in the middle of the night on the West Coast of the United States.

Armed with this exclusive knowledge, Kevin would spend the night attempting to register these domains, typing in multiple browser windows on multiple computers to improve his chances. Many times, he was successful. However, many times he was beat to the punch by other domaining pioneers. He discovered that programmers like Yun Ye (Ultsearch) had developed scripts to register desired domain names instantly upon expiration. Not to be outdone, Ham wrote his own scripts. His success rate increased, but he still felt he could do better.

Kevin Ham made a bold move by going directly to registrars to seek assistance. He helped them write software to grab domains quickly after expiration. In exchange, he paid registrars up to $100 for their help in padding his portfolio.