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eNom Acquires BulkRegister

eNom has acquired BulkRegister, LLC in a deal that combines providers that focus on high-volume customers. BulkRegister, which had been owned by hosting company Alabanza, manages more than 1.5 million domains for its 35,000 customers. eNom said the acquisition gives it more than 6.8 million domain names under management, allowing it to pass Network Solutions to become the second-largest registrar after Go Daddy.

"We are excited about this significant and synergistic addition to our domain platform," said Paul Stahura, founder and chief executive officer of eNom. "Both eNom and BulkRegister have built up strong, loyal and successful customer bases, by providing great tools, high quality service, and a solid technology platform. The combination of the two companies is a natural fit."

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  Posted by RichM July 27, 2006 | Permalink | Newsletter

July 24, 2006

Boing Boing is usually a great read, but this week's item on domain name kiting and the add-grace period (AGP) wasn't its best work. The practice - which Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow called a "new online scam" - has been widely discussed for more than a year (see July 2005 post at Netcraft, among others that mention the practice), and has since been written about by the Internet Stock Blog and Joi Ito (a prominent friend of Boing Boing), among many others.

But no one has been more visible on this issue than Go Daddy CEO Bob Parsons, who was the first person to use the term "domain name kiting" on his Hot Points blog on May 10. Parsons then took his case to the pages of Business Week.

Maybe Cory Doctorow wasn't aware of the lineage of the term when he linked to DomainNameKiting.com. A whois search shows that the domain name is registered at Go Daddy and "owned" by Domains By Proxy, a privacy service run by Go Daddy. Is the domain name really owned by a third party that just happened to use all Go Daddy's services to register and cloak the ownership info on the name? The related forum, DomainKitingSucks.com is also owned by - you guessed it - Domains by Proxy.

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  Posted by RichM July 24, 2006 | Permalink | Newsletter

July 9, 2006

Domain incubation is a new strategy in which domain owners "outsource" their site management to a third-party service that provides content and link-building support. Internet domain incubation differs from parking in that it doesn't generate revenue, but can improve a domain's resale value by improving its Google rank and the number of incoming links.

DomainIncubation.com is a free service from Coast Internet Solutions, Inc. of Edgewater, NJ. Participants point their names at the nameservers for the service, which develops a web site to improve the value of the domain. DomainIncubation.com keeps the revenue from ads that are placed on the site, while the domain owner gets the benefit of improved PageRank and backlinks, which in turn can improve the name's resale value or establish enough traffic to begin monetizing the site through a domain parking service. The service says the designs won't be "first-class" but won't be scraper sites either, providing an example at Security-guard.org. The sample links are managed by blog software or a script that pulls directory content from the Open Directory Project (dmoz.og).

"This offer is intended for those with poor quality domains," notes the intro to the concept at the Domain Incubation web site. "You will sell a domain with some PR and backlinks for more than you will without them. We do all of the work and take the risk that you could remove your domain at anytime, that's why we keep any and all money from advertising. If you think your domain is hot and will generate money from type-in traffic, you should use a domain parking service that will pay you part of the income."

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  Posted by RichM July 9, 2006 | Permalink | Newsletter

July 5, 2006

It's been 18 months since Google became a domain registrar, a move that initially shook up the domain and hosting businesses amid the notion that Google might make domain names available for free. Before long, Google watchers advanced an alternate theory: that Google would use its access to the list of recently sold domains to clean up its search results, resetting a site's PageRank when its domain changes hands.

That theory has now been confirmed, thanks to the sharp-eyes of Kevin Murphy at Texturbation, who noted comments by Google employee (and ICANN chair) Vint Cerf in the recent domain marketplace discussion at ICANN's conference in Marrakech. Here's the cogent excerpt (from a much longer transcript):

VINT CERF: When a domain name has expired, and then it's re-assigned to someone else, what happens to the SOA (Start of Authority) record for that domain name as to its start date? Does that change automatically or does it stay the same or are there circumstances where a domain name changes hands but it doesn't look like it has if you are looking at its birth date?

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  Posted by RichM July 5, 2006 | Permalink | Newsletter