Domain Registrars

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:

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