Domain Registrars

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:

Two factor authentication (2FA) has been available at most domain registrars for quite some time. Domain registrants can enable 2FA on their registrar accounts, and they are usually given different 2FA options like SMS, Authenticator App, or Security keyfob.

While 2FA is an option for domain registrants, it is not a requirement at most registrars. In the case of CSC, a well-known corporate domain name registrar, 2FA has been a requirement for customers since 2017:

At the end of July, I wrote about Spaceship surpassing 100,000 domain names under management (DUM). The registrar continues to grow, and its Founder Richard Kirkendall announced it has more than 200,000 domain names under management:

In a few short months, Spaceship has surpassed 200k domains under management. We have had 63,000 domains transferred to us with over 90% of those transfers being from registrars other than Namecheap. Big thanks to all of our customers!

— Richard Kirkendall (@NamecheapCEO) October 2, 2023

Domain registrar front running is when a domain registrar tracks the domain name searches its customers perform, and when the customer does not register the domain name, the registrar registers it. The registrar would then attempt to sell the domain name back to the customer at an inflated price or would prevent the person from registering the domain name at a different registrar. TechCrunch published an article about front running back in 2008.

Over the years and since that time, I have seen dozens of public complaints about domain registrars reportedly front running domain names. I have also received quite a few private emails about this along with blog comments accusing registrars of doing this.

There are numerous reasons for why it doesn’t make much sense for a domain registrar to front run its customers. Over the weekend, Marc Köhlbrugge shared why it is not likely to happen: