If you had a domain reserved at one registrar, and wanted to use a different registrar, would you really want the original registrar to unreserve it and put it into the spare pool and then go to the other registrar and ask them to reserve it?

Now imagine that it takes the new registrar a couple days to actually process and get the name out of the pool for you. Would you really want to leave your domain name exposed for anyone? Of course not!

That would be stupid to do because you would risk losing your domain name and it’s equally stupid with toll free numbers. The only difference is that sometimes reps at different phone companies don’t realize the competitiveness of the toll free squatters or want to admit how slow their own organization can be. And they’re not the ones that are risking anything if your number gets lost, you are.

So don’t try to short cut the system. If you used our system to find a good number, activate it and you can transfer it to any phone company you want safely and as efficiently as possible.

First off, reservations never last more than 45 days unless someone calls and asks for the reservation to be dropped.

The Resporg information which is what you’re seeing when it says 1-800 MARKETER is updated monthly. The only thing we can check live is whether it’s available or not. And when you can only see whether it’s available or not, it’s hard to tell when a reservation has ended if someone else picks it up, because it’s still “not available”.

Nobody wants you to lose numbers but please don’t count on them lasting the full 45 days, because as our volume increases we may run out of reservation capacity so we may need to take off the oldest ones earlier at times.

I tell people it’s 15 days so that we don’t have to tell many people that they lost their number when they come to us at 18 days. But I can’t do much about it at 48 days, even if the Resporg information for that number hasn’t been updated yet (that’s done monthly).

My goal is to help people get numbers and throwing back or turning away someone ready to buy doesn’t help anyone. If you ever have a question in the future, just drop us a note or give us a call.

Bill

I would like to reserve several numbers that you’ve provided, but I may not be ready to ‘go live’ with them now, or for months yet. What does ‘Activate’ really mean? In other words, can I own phone numbers like domain names….hold them but not use them immediately?

Thanks….great service!

Ron

There are two recent posts that I think cover some of this, but the short answer is that we don’t have a specific deadline although sometime after a year they may be considered abandoned. But there are also several reasons why you should transfer them sooner rather than later, (see fake it post) and several potential downsides to waiting too (see waiting can cost you post) and there is no real benefit to waiting because toll free numbers cost so little per month just to have.

See: waiting-can-cost-more-than-you-realize.html

See: fake-it-till-you-make-it.html

.Bill Quimby.