The Ascendancy of .co
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An anonymous reader tipped the fact that, with the .com namespace getting pretty well mined out, GoDaddy.com's front page for domain registrations now defaults to .co instead of .com. The article claims that GoDaddy registers about half of new domain names. Neither the article nor GoDaddy makes it explicit that .co is a ccTLD belonging to Colombia, or that registering one costs about three times as much as a .com, at $29.99 per year. And if you select a .co domain name from GoDaddy's front page, a number of TLD variants are presented alongside .co — but .com is not among them.
It's not mined out. (Score:5, Informative)
It's squatted, sniped, tasted, and front-run out.
When a speculator can register thousands of names and move them around for free by playing the system, is there any wonder that .com is "mined out"? When a registrar front-runs domain names (Network Solutions) and fills the space with reserved names for itself, is there any wonder that .com is "mined out"?
Get rid of domain tasting and other shenanigans and the problem will go away.
--
BMO
Re:It's not mined out. (Score:3, Informative)
This.
Also 'investors'. A little while back I read an online article by someone congratulating themselves on investing in .com names. He was going through a dictionary, finding obscure words and testing to see if they were available, then buying them up. He had about 30 dictionary words and he was going to make money on the idea, also encouraging others to do the same.
It's one of those times when you wish you could reach through the screen and strangle the person on the other side. Squatters, 'investors' and other assorted asshats have between them sat on pretty much and word or word combination in existence, meaning that 99% of them just aren't used, ever.
It's a shame that money-hungry tools have been able to do this. Maybe the internet was better in the early 90s.
GoDaddy stories on Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
Go Daddy Usurps Network Solutions [slashdot.org] (2005-05-04)
GoDaddy Serves Blank Pages to Safari & Opera [slashdot.org] (2005-12-08)
GoDaddy.com Dumps Linux for Microsoft [slashdot.org] (2006-03-23)
GoDaddy Holds Domains Hostage [slashdot.org] (2006-06-17)
GoDaddy Caves To Irish Legal Threat [slashdot.org] (2006-09-16)
MySpace and GoDaddy Shut Down Security Site [slashdot.org] (2007-01-26) That incident prompted this web site:
Exposing the Many Reasons Not to Trust GoDaddy with Your Domain Names [nodaddy.com].
Alternative Registrars to GoDaddy? [slashdot.org] (2007-02-03)
GoDaddy Bobbles DST Changeover? [slashdot.org] (2007-03-11)
850K RegisterFly Domains Moved To GoDaddy [slashdot.org] (2007-05-29)
According to this March 11, 2008 story in Wired, GoDaddy shut down an entire web site of 250,000 pages because of one archived mailing list comment: GoDaddy Silences Police-Watchdog Site RateMyCop.com [wired.com]. See below for Slashdot's story about RateMyCop.com.
GoDaddy Silences RateMyCop.com [slashdot.org] (2008-03-12)
ICANN Moves Against GoDaddy Domain Lockdowns [slashdot.org] (2008-04-08)
GoDaddy VP Caught Bidding Against Customers [slashdot.org] (2008-06-29)
KnujOn Updates Top 10 Spam-Friendly Registrars List [slashdot.org] (2009-02-06, 80 comments) GoDaddy is on the list.
R.I.P. FTP [slashdot.org] (2009-07-13, 359 comments) The GoDaddy web site is extremely complicated. Quote: "In that case, why don't more people switch to administering their sites via SFTP instead of FTP? Here are the steps it took me to enable SFTP on my GoDaddy hosting account. Feel free to use this as a reference, but the obvious point is that as long as this many steps are required, it's safe to say that most users won't be switching: 1) Go to the 'Hosting' menu and pick 'My Hosting Account.' 2) Next to the name of your website, pick 'Manage Account.' This will open the Hosting Control Center. 3) In Hosting Control Center, click to expand the 'Settings' options. 4) In the 'Settings' control panel, click the 'SSH' icon. 5) You will see a page saying 'SSH is not set up', and prompting you to enter a phone number so that their automated service can call you with a PIN number. After you enter your phone number, the phone rings a second later, and you enter the PIN in a form on the GoDaddy website. 6 ) You will then see a page which says: Current Hosting Account Status: Pending Account Change -- Your request to enable SSH is being processed. This upgrade may take up to 24 hours." [Punctuation and emphasis changed for clarity.]
Registrars Still Ignoring ICANN Rules [slashdot.org] (2009-07-22, 122 comments) Quote: "GoDaddy (and their reseller arm, Wild West Domains) have a different problem: They still block transfers for 60 days after a registrant's contact update, even after the ICANN update specifically prohibited doing so. They freely admit it, too."
Re:It's not mined out. (Score:5, Informative)
Get rid of domain tasting
It's pretty much gone:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting [wikipedia.org]
"ICANN reported in August 2009, that prior to implementing excess domain deletion charges, the peak month for domain tastings was over 15 million domain names. After the $0.20 fee was implemented, this dropped to around 2 million domain names per month. As a result of the further increase in charges for excess domain deletions, implemented starting April 2009, the number of domain tastings dropped to below 60 thousand per month."
I know from personal experience that a domain I had let lapse and was sat on for years became available again after the ICANN policy was put in place.
Re:Public needs to learn not everyting is dot com (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What registrar would you recommend? (Score:3, Informative)
gandi.net
Namecheap (Score:5, Informative)
I've been using Namecheap for years, and they've been pretty awesome. They have a nice set of DNS management tools, they notify me of all important things, and as their name implies, they're inexpensive.
Another thing I like about Namecheap is that you can delegate control over your names to other people. I run a suite of hobby gaming web sites, and I've made contingency plans in case I get hit by a proverbial bus. (Or a real one.) I've given one of the other site admins permissions over the names so that if need be, he can manage them or even move them to another registrar. Obviously, I trust him implicitly, but the point is that if something happens to me, the names aren't just up for grabs once the registration expires. They may exist, but I don't know of another registrar that allows you to delegate permissions like this.
I can't speak about their technical support; I've never had to use it.
Just to prove I'm not a shill for the company (I'm only affiliated with them as being a customer), if there's one thing that's stupid about them, it's their name. I mean, "Namecheap"? Makes them sound so, I dunno, Wal-Martish, especially given what has been a good record so far with me.
Re:What registrar would you recommend? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's not mined out. (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, its frustrating. I am trying to come with the a .com name and most of the a names are squatted (Registered but no website or godaddy.com website.)
The web is not the internet. There are many more things to use a domain for than just a website.
Re:Namecheap (Score:2, Informative)
That's what I did, and now my company provides and sells domains to all of our website design customers as a part of our packages.
Why go to a secondary reseller, when you can become one yourself and take out a middle man.
Re:A money grab (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, the reason Google knows that bit more about sites people visit, is that Firefox, Chrome and Safari all send each and every domain you visit to Google's Safebrowsing servers before they connect to it.
That is not how SafeBrowsing works. Firefox downloads a large database of hash prefixes. If the hashes of the domain and url are not in the list you go to the site and nothing is sent to Google. If the first bit of the hash matches an entry in the list Firefox asks Google for the list of complete hashes that start with that prefix. If the site's hash matches then you're blocked, if it doesn't you're not, but nothing more is sent.
To further obfuscate things, when Firefox finds a prefix match it doesn't just ask for the hashes matching that prefix, it also asks for the hashes matching a couple other random prefixes from the list.
Google may still know all the sites you visit through cookies on google-analytics or AdSense, but they're not getting that information from SafeBrowsing.