I am interested in buying a domain name registered under Whois privacy proxy at Namecheap. I visited the Whois lookup page on Namecheap to see if I could send a message to the registrant via the Namecheap system (like the GoDaddy Whois contact form), but it doesn’t look like there’s a contact form. Instead, there is a “Make Offer” button above the Whois information:
Namecheap Founder and CEO Richard Kirkendall posted a tweet this morning proudly announcing this his company is now the second largest domain registrar in the world by number of domain names under management attributed to its ICANN accreditation, as recorded by RegistrarOwl.com:
Namecheap is now the second largest registrar in the world based on ICANN accreditation https://t.co/3lruStvTm6 . We’ve got one more mountain ahead of us to climb but we are on our way.
— Richard Kirkendall (@NamecheapCEO) August 6, 2020
Namecheap sent out a press release today announcing some special offers for legacy TLDs, including .com, .net, and .org, in honor of the company’s 19th birthday. The special prices are valid for new domain name registrations as well as for transfers. The deals are only available today. More specifically, the offer runs from October 15, 12:00 AM ET and ends October 16, 11:59 PM ET.
Here’s a copy of the press release, which has all of the details about the birthday registration and transfer pricing offer:
Namecheap sent out a press release this morning introducing a new bulk domain name search tool that the company says could help domain investors. The tool is called “Beast Mode,” and it is bill as “one of the fastest and most comprehensive bulk-search tools on the market.” Users can search up to 5,000 keywords at a time in multiple extensions. By comparison, GoDaddy’s bulk search tool (which I use occasionally) allows 500 domain names per search.
In addition to the press release I shared below, Namecheap also posted a video to show how visitors can use the bulk search tool to find domain names:
Namecheap is one of the largest domain name registrars with more than ten million domain names under management. The company boasts an active Twitter account, which is quite engaged with its customers. Namecheap CEO and founder Richard Kirkendall also engages with Namecheap customers, and I was impressed by the way he responded to a customer’s criticism this morning.
A Twitter user mentioned the @namecheap account on Twitter to criticize the timing of the company’s “scheduled maintenance” that took place the morning after a bank holiday and temporarily took down his email:
Namecheap held its annual Move Your Domain Day (MYDD) yesterday. While the event is used by Namecheap to bolster its registration numbers, it also raises funds for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Since 2011, the company has reportedly donated over $250,000 to the EFF as a result of this marketing effort.
During yesterday’s event, 33,428 domains were transferred to Namecheap using the EFF coupon code that was created for the Move Your Domain Day event. This means that Namecheap will donate a total of $50,845.50 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I understand that yesterday’s event was the largest to date, surpassing the initial event held in 2011.
According to a Wikipedia entry, the impetus for Move Your Domain Day was “initially in response to Go Daddy’s support of the Stop Online Piracy Act.” As you are probably aware,
