Domain Registrars Archives - Page 9 of 22

Surprised Google Didn’t Acquire Registrar

Domain Registrars
Google

Elliot Silver

June 24, 2014

The big news this morning is about Google plans to launch a public domain registrar and that “the search giant quietly launched Google Domains on Monday as an invite-only beta service.” One thing I am a bit surprised about is that Google didn’t acquire (at least to my knowledge) an existing domain registrar.

As one might expect, domain registrar stocks have taken a bit of a hit following the news, as reported on Domain Name Wire. The market is likely fearful that Google will be able to carve out some market share from existing companies. I don’t know if that will happen, but it’s something people will be watching.

With the news, I am a bit surprised that

Domain Registrars
New gTLD

Joe Alagna

June 19, 2014

Publisher’s Note: After learning about the .Berlin free domain name offer (now discontinued), I reached out to 101Domain’s Joe Alagna to discuss the strategy of giving gTLD domain names for free. Some people speculate that it is a bad sign for the gTLD program, and I asked Joe to share his insight.

The .berlin registry rocketed to near the top in new gTLDs this week by offering their domain names for free for a limited time. .Berlin was already off to a good start. They went into General Availability in March, 2014. Over thirty thousand were registered within the first few days and then registrations leveled off to an average of fifty or one-hundred per day. With the free offer in place, they added close to seventy-thousand registrations, bringing their total Domains Under Management (DUM) to over 138,000 and making them the second most popular new gTLD to be released in the past year. I’ve been asked, “does this help?” I think the answer depends on who one is thinking of. Let me start by talking about registrants.

Do TLD Give-aways Help Registrants?

Of course they

Domain Registrars
Moniker

Elliot Silver

June 2, 2014

I ran into a login issues at Moniker this weekend, and I was fortunate to call them first thing this morning and have it resolved (as far as I can tell) by technical support. Based on what I read in the comment section of yesterday’s blog post as well as comments on Domain Name Wire and OnlineDomain.com, others seem to be having issues with Moniker as well. The company upgraded and updated its platform over the weekend.

For my company, the timing on this issue is not good, and I hope my issue is really resolved and doesn’t impact my account beyond the login trouble I faced. I am in the middle of a sale involving a domain name at Moniker, and the payment should clear by tomorrow. I had requested the authorization code and unlocked the domain name last week, but for some reason the name was locked when I logged in, and I was assigned a new EPP auth code for the transfer out. Luckily, the customer support person was very nice and she guided me through the process of unlocking the name and requesting the authorization code.

This afternoon, Moniker posted an update on

Advice
Domain Registrars

Elliot Silver

May 26, 2014

I don’t know about you, but I find it particularly annoying when a registrar domain transfer takes far longer than it should. In my opinion, if a domain name is transferred to another domain registrar, it should take no longer than a day to complete as long as all approvals are made by the transferring parties. Unfortunately, it can take up to 5 days for a transfer to be finalized.

Some domain registrars make it very easy to transfer domain names. I’ve transferred names from Enom to GoDaddy in just a few minutes. Unfortunately, I’ve found that some domain registrars seem to make it difficult, and it takes the full 5 days to go through. Perhaps they think that a customer will change his or her mind during that time period or maybe there are other reasons, but it’s frustrating to wait when I know it can be done more quickly.

If you sell a domain name and are awaiting the successful transfer to get paid or if you are consolidating your domain portfolio at one registrar and want it done more quickly, here’s a tip to speed up the domain transfer process.

Advice
Domain Registrars

Elliot Silver

April 10, 2014

As I was going through my domain name registrar accounts to change passwords due to the Heartbleed bug, I realized how fortunate I am to have domain names registered at just a few domain registrars. I don’t know how many domain registrars are vulnerable due to the bug, but I do know account security is one of (if not) the most critical components to a domain registrar.

If you are able to do so, I strongly recommend consolidating your domain names at one, two, or three domain registrars for a number of reasons, and I want to share five of them with you. If you have other reasons why you think consolidation is important, feel free to share a comment. If you disagree with me and feel that your domain names should be spread out amongst a variety of domain registrars, you are welcome to share your thoughts about that as well.

1) Account Security – The fewer domain registrar accounts you

Buying Domain Names
Domain Registrars

April 2, 2014

101 Domain is celebrating its 15 year anniversary, and in honor of the occasion, the company is giving three discount offers during the month of April. The coupon codes are offered to customers for purchasing new gTLD domain names, and the discounts range from 10% off to 20% off depending on the number of new domain names you want to buy.

The coupon codes to save on your purchase are listed below next to the offer.