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GoDaddy not increasing discount club price for existing subscribers

by — Domain Registrars 3 Comments

Existing subscribers will continue to pay $120 per year.

Picture of an arrow pointing up and to the right. The arrow is black on an orange background

There was an uproar last week when GoDaddy customers who subscribe to the Discount Domain Club received renewal notices with a hefty price hike. Customers were shocked to get notices that the annual membership cost was doubling from $120 to $240.

Discount Domain Club (DDC) is a paid discount program that gives customers heavily-discounted rates on domains. Customers with DDC pay $8.29 for .com domain registrations and renewals, which is substantially less than GoDaddy’s list price. The program also discounts other top level domains.

GoDaddy released this statement to Domain Name Wire after our inquiry about the price change:

When we launched Discount Domain Club 12 years ago, we wanted to create a program that assisted our customers with larger portfolio a way to maintain their portfolios at a reasonable price. While the prices of domain names have increased over the years, Discount Domain Club has not kept up. So for new customers, we have increased the price to bring the program back in line with original intentions. While new customers will have the updated price, existing customers will receive the same price they always have.

It turns out that, despite erroneous renewal notices, existing subscribers have been locked in at the $120 price.

Paying a fee to get discounted prices is controversial. Before it was acquired by GoDaddy, Uniregistry faced a backlash after raising its prices unless customers joined a discount club. Some registrars offer prices that are close to the discounted prices offered with these programs without the need to join a program, and others will extend discounted prices to large customers who ask.

Several registrars currently charge less than $9 per year for .com registrations and renewals. PorkBun, for example, charges $8.56.

.Com prices will increase during 2021 when Verisign increases the wholesale price of .com domain names. Keep a close eye on how much registrars increase their fees in response to Verisign’s increase.

Afternic may give more insight into leads

by — Domain Registrars 0 Comments

Uniregistry platform is showing when a lead comes in from Afternic.

Picture of hand drawing a sales funnel with leads coming in the top and dollars coming out the bottom

One of the nice things about Afternic is that its brokers take care of all inquiries for you. You don’t have to bother with confused inquirers and people who won’t pay anywhere close to your price. You only hear from its brokers when a domain sells or an offer is close.

The downside is that Afternic doesn’t give you any visibility into inquiries that don’t result in a sale. There’s no indication in your account that a domain received offers/inquiries, although you can manually ask your account manager for this data.

This might change for the better.

In a Uniregistry market update this week, the GoDaddy-owned company said that it is now labeling Afternic leads on domains that are in the Uniregistry market:

Apart from increased sales, the integration also gives you a greater amount of insight into your domain portfolio. You will now be able to see new leads received through the Afternic Network directly in your Uni Market account! You can identify these leads in your account by the “Network Lead” label. This feature is currently unique to UniMarket clients as a beta test and will hopefully be available within Afternic in the coming months as well.

A lead is a valuable indicator even when it doesn’t result in a sale. Even if the top offer on a domain was $250, knowing that an offer came in, or that a domain received a lot of inquiries, is enough to make it worth renewing the domain name.

It would be very helpful if GoDaddy could pull this information into the GoDaddy domain manager, too.

While I’m on my wishlist, I’d like Afternic to make it easier to see how much parking revenue domains have made. A simple .csv download like Uniregistry offers would suffice.

Tool generates trending domain registration ideas

by — Domain Registrars 0 Comments

UIDomains takes a different approach to domain discovery.

Image showing popular trending keywords in domain name registrations, such as Biden and Trump

The trending keywords report on UIDomains.

There are lots of domain name spinning tools out there that help you find domains to register. I recently became aware of one that takes a very different approach to the others.

UIDomains.com looks at trending keywords in registered .com domain names and combines these with the user’s keyword.

In the background, UIDomains looks at all of the domains registered today and the word frequencies in the domains. It then keeps track of words that are trending over time.

The Daily Trending Domain Keywords report shows which words are trending and how this has changed over time. The number in the blue box shows how many domains with the term were registered over the past day.

Compare this to a traditional name spinner like LeanDomainSearch, which uses the most popular keywords in domains overall as a static list for name spinning.

Of course, trending words might not be a good fit for your search term. Trump and Biden are trending today, but the terms don’t make sense for many domain registrations.

The service also offers more traditional spinning by running your keyword against lists of common keywords, 4-5 letter words, and other lists. This can be tweaked in the advanced settings.

UIDomains does domain lookups in two modes. The fast mode is extremely fast, but only 95% accurate. This is frustrating: the names that pop out at you as registration candidates are the most likely to be false positives. Whenever I spotted a compelling name that it showed was available, it turned out the domain was already taken. There’s a slower mode that’s more accurate.

It’s worth noting that your searches and the resulting lists are public on the site. This shouldn’t be a big issue because you are likely to register good domains immediately. There’s a premium option with added features, including keeping your searches private.

 

GoDaddy (all of it) went down this evening

by — Domain Registrars 23 Comments

All of GoDaddy — including its main website — went down this evening.

GoDaddy logo showing the heart-shaped design

GoDaddy had technical difficulties Tuesday evening that took down its entire network, including websites hosted on GoDaddy.

In a statement made Wednesday, GoDaddy explained the outage:

GoDaddy experienced a service outage between approximately 7:00pm-11:00pm PST last night. The outage was related to an error encountered during planned network maintenance and impacted multiple products and services. It was not a security incident. The issue was resolved by our team and affected customers immediately began seeing improved services. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by this disruption.

The main GoDaddy.com website was not resolving for a significant portion of the 7 PM PST hour, but the home page came back around 7:50 PM PST. Login functionality started working again around 8:20 PM PST.

As of 8:20 PM PST, some websites hosted on GoDaddy began resolving again. However, users reported continued difficulty later in the evening, and GoDaddy tweeted at 8:44 PM that there were still issues. It tweeted at 6:08 am Wednesday morning that the issue had been resolved.

Based on twitter chatter about the outage, the issue appears to have begun around 7:20 PM PST Tuesday. I received a site outage alert via WordPress JetPack at 7:27 PM PST.

DownDetector.com reported an increase in reports starting at about 7 pm this evening.

At 7:38 PM PST, GoDaddy tweeted that it was aware of the issue and was working on it:

The network status page for GoDaddy is hosted on the GoDaddy.com domain and did not seem to resolve during the outage.

GoDaddy launches GoDaddy Corporate Domains for large brands

by — Domain Registrars 2 Comments

GoDaddy rebrands Brandsight and launches it as GoDaddy Corporate Domains.

Screenshot of homepage for GoDaddy Corporate Domains

GoDaddy announced GoDaddy Corporate Domains today.

The brand-targeted registrar is a rechristening of Brandsight, a corporate domain name registrar that GoDaddy acquired as part of the Frank Schilling business acquisition.

GoDaddy Corporate Domains will compete with corporate domain name registrars such as MarkMonitor, CSC, and SafeNames.

There are two interesting things to note about the announcement.

First is that GoDaddy plans to leverage its large retail registrar as a reason for brands to get on board. It launched the GoDaddy Verified Intellectual Property (VIP) program, which it describes as providing

“pre-vetted, well-known and famous brands an escalation path to address IP abuse. It covers fraudulent domains registrations, infringing websites hosted with GoDaddy, among other forms of abuse.”

The program is currently invitation-only.

Second, GoDaddy Corporate Domains picked a nice domain for the business: GCD.com. It appears that the domain was used by a Chicago-area law firm that rebranded after merging with another firm.

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