This morning, Namecheap and Spaceship Founder and CEO Richard Kirkendall announced a free Whois history tool that is available on Spaceship.com. Users don’t need to be logged into their Spaceship account – or even Spaceship customers – to access this free tool.
Richard shared a video demonstration of how it works in a post via X:
In a press release distributed this morning, Porkbun announced it hit the 2 million domain names under management milestone. The registrar was established in 2015, and it hit the 1 million mark seven years later in 2022. It is an impressive feat to have doubled that number in about two years.
Notably, Porkbun was founded as a retail registrar focused on selling non-.com domain names in extensions owned by its parent company, Top Level Design. The press release shared some of this background for those unfamiliar with Porkbun’s history:
Earlier this morning, Richard Kirkendall shared that Spaceship hit the 1 million Domains Under Management (DUM) mark. Richard is the Founder of Namecheap and its sister registrar, Spaceship, which came out of beta just over a year ago:
We’ve just surpassed 1 million domains under management at @spaceship! We launched in open beta just about 14 months ago. I believe it took us about 5 years to reach this milestone at Namecheap. Big thanks from all us to all of you, our customers that have chosen us and trusted… pic.twitter.com/21hhsPSH5J
— Richard Kirkendall (@NamecheapCEO) June 12, 2024
Following Richard’s comments, the Spaceship PR team shared some data about the domain names registered via its platform. Some of the data was surprising to me. Here are some of the facts that caused me to do a double take.
There have been many times I visited a domain industry website and thought of an idea that would be helpful. On occasion, I’ve taken some action and gotten in touch with a decision maker to offer a suggestion. Off the top of my head, I don’t recall seeing anything implemented (yet).
I received an email from Spaceship this morning announcing a new service called Unbox. You can read about that offering on the Spaceship website.
What caught my attention in this morning’s email is the section about growing together:
Spaceship is a rapidly growing domain registrar founded by Namecheap CEO Richard Kirkendall. In mid-April, the registrar hit 775,000 domains under management (DUM) after passing the 400,000 mark just a few months prior.
This morning, Richard shared a Spaceship coupon code that could appeal to people seeking to transfer their .com domain names at a reduced price. The code Richard shared on X is SPSCOMTR. The code allows for unlimited .com transfers to Spaceship for $7.99 + the ICANN fee, which I believe is $.18 per domain name.
It’s nice to see a domain industry CEO engaging with customers on social media. I appreciate that Dynadot Founder and CEO Todd Han is active on X, and seems interested in communicating with domain investors.
Last week, he posted about Dynadot’s move to Notion as its project management tool. In addition to sharing some of the open projects, he asked people if they want any new features at Dynadot:
