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Latest .com ranking has some surprises

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Two registrars posted big gains in September.

The words "top 10 domain registrars" in purple and yellow text

ICANN has published the latest official data from Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN) about the .com namespace. This registrar-by-registrar report covers September 2020.

There were a couple of surprises in the monthly numbers. Perhaps they are anomalies. First, Hosting Concepts/OpenProvider had a surge in one-year .com registrations, placing it in the top ten. Second, United Internet’s PSI brand posted a surge that doubled the overall company’s .com registrations compared to the prior month.

CentralNic’s brands continue to grow, and I’ll add them as a combined entity starting next month.

Here’s how registrars did in terms of new .com registrations in September:

1. GoDaddy.com* (NYSE: GDDY) 914,038 (970,570 in August)
2. Namecheap Inc. 284,154 (276,557)
3. Tucows** (NASDAQ:TCX) 231,791 (245,360)
4. Endurance+ (NASDAQ: EIGI) 178,499 (199,710)
5. Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) 157,453 (168,619)
6. Alibaba (HiChina) 155,926 (221,686)
7. United Internet^ 142,553 (70,580)
8. Hosting Concepts B.V. d/b/a Openprovider 101,645
9. Wix (NASDAQ: WIX) 97,021 (108,029)
10. NameSilo (CSE:URL) 71,291 (68,308)

Here’s the leaderboard of the top registrars in terms of total .com registrations under management as of the end of September 2020.

1. GoDaddy* 54,450,745 (54,215,433 in August)
2. Tucows** 12,963,637 (12,930,920)
3. Endurance+ 7,232,301 (7,183,871)
4. Web.com++ 7,066,244 (7,041,224)
5. Namecheap 6,516,860 (6,338,718)
6. Alibaba 5,947,947 (5,962,510)
7. United Internet^ 5,639,402 (5,554,345)
8. Google 3,924,273 (3,846,200)
9. Xin Net Technology Corporation 2,244,819 (2,539,828)
10. GMO 2,191,732 (2,212,268)

Many domain companies have multiple accreditations and I’ve tried to capture the largest ones. See the notes below.

* Includes GoDaddy, Wild West Domains, Uniregistry and 123 Reg
** Includes Tucows, Enom, Ascio and EPAG
+ Includes PDR, Domain.com, FastDomain and Bigrock. There are other Endurance registrars, but these are the biggest.
++ Includes Network Solutions, Register.com, and Crazy Domains/Dreamscape
^ Includes 1&1, PSI, Cronon, United-Domains, Arsys and world4you

CentralNic acquires SafeBrands for up to €3.6m

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CentralNic gobbles up brand-focused registrar with plans to extend its reach beyond French-speaking countries.

CentralNic logo

CentralNic (AIM: CNIC) announced today that it has acquired SafeBrands, a brand/corporate-focused domain registrar based in France.

The company will pay up to €3.6m ($4.4m) for the business. €3.0 million will be paid upfront and the rest is subject to meeting FY 20 financial objectives. The price is approximately 0.9x SafeBrand’s FY 2019 revenue. The business operates at approximately break-even.

SafeBrands currently caters only to French-speaking customers. CentralNic plans to extend this to other languages, giving the company upside in the transaction.

CentralNic is renaming its Corporate division as the Enterprise division in conjunction with the deal. This division is made up primarily of brand services. The company hired Haydn Simpson last year, and he is now the Head of Brand Services. He previously worked for  NetNames, CSC and BrandSight (now GoDaddy Corporate Domains).

CentralNic also entered into a reciprocal reseller agreement for domain names and brand protection services with IP protection company Novagraaf. Additionally, CentralNic sold its minority stake in ThomsenTrampedach, a Swiss-based Online Brand Protection service provider, to Novagraaf.

Parler.com domain moves to Epik

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Social media network mainly used by conservative voices moves its domain to registrar Epik.

Logo for Parler

The social media network Parler has moved its domain name from DreamHost to Epik, a domain name registrar known for attracting domain names used by far-right and conspiracy theory websites.

Yesterday, the company issued a statement saying that it had not been in touch with Parler since AWS announced that it was kicking the site off of its platform. The statement criticized tech companies for “deplatforming” and appears to have been an attempt to get Parler’s attention.

Amazon was not the registrar for the domain name; DreamHost is a competing webhost and domain name registrar.

The nameserver records for Parler.com still point to AWS servers, so the site is not active at this time. [Update: Parler has not moved its nameservers to Epik.com.But as of 2:40 PM PST on Monday, the site does not resolve.]

Epik is the registrar for Gab.com, another right-leaning social network that is rapidly scaling in light of last week’s events. The company openly courted Gab when other registrars pushed it off their platforms, which led to a number of similar sites choosing Epik as their registrar.

 

Epik continues to bash GoDaddy. GoDaddy says this is why it dropped Epik

by — Domain Registrars 37 Comments

Epik suggests reasons why GoDaddy might have dropped Epik from its Afternic program, and GoDaddy responds.

Logo for Epik domain name company

When PayPal notified Epik in October that it was terminating its services with the domain name registrar, Epik fired off letters blaming a number of organizations for the move. One of the companies that drew its ire was GoDaddy. Epik published attacks against the domain name registrar and provided contact information for many of its employees.

The next month, GoDaddy terminated its Afternic partnership with Epik, apparently catching Epik by surprise.

Epik went public about the termination, apparently violating the contract it signed with GoDaddy in doing so. Epik seemed to tie GoDaddy’s decision to a number of factors, and oddly questioned receiving GoDaddy’s letter “two hours after the election was called for Joe Biden.”

Yesterday, Epik published another letter about the Afternic termination. It argued that one of the factors leading to the termination was that Epik was reporting security issues with the platform.

I reached out to GoDaddy yesterday to see if the company would provide any information about its decision to terminate the partnership with Epik.

Paul Nicks, GoDaddy VP, Domains – Investors and Corporate, issued this statement in response:

Once again, Epik has lobbed baseless accusations against us. To be crystal clear, Epik has not provided us with reports of “repeated Afternic security issues.” If anyone has any concerns about our systems, we work closely with them to answer any questions or resolve issues. This is how a real partnership works.

The reason Epik was dropped has everything to do with their constant attacking of us. We don’t feel the need to partner with someone who time and time again casually lies about a wide variety of issues.

We will not be providing further statements on their business, and reserve the right to explore any and all possible legal options to defend against their baseless claims.

The scariest thing about that GoDaddy phishing test story

by — Domain Registrars 27 Comments

A lot of employees apparently fell for it.

Image representing email phishing

GoDaddy has been taking a lot of heat for a phishing test email it sent to many of its employees right before the holidays.

The email told recipients that they were receiving a $650 holiday bonus and asked them to click a link in order to receive the bonus.

The bonus wasn’t real. It was a test to see if employees would fall for a phishing attack.

I understand why some employees are upset about the test. But I’m more concerned that 500 people reportedly failed the test.

I’m not sure what “failing” means here. Does that just mean they clicked the link? Or did they divulge passwords?

Regardless, that’s a lot of people failing a test in a company of about 7,000. (That assumes everyone received the test email, too.)

I suspect fewer people would have been duped if they were in an office setting rather than working from home. Word would have quickly spread around the call centers, “don’t click that link!”

But it’s clear that GoDaddy needs to continue to educate and test its employees. It holds the keys to valuable assets and people are trying to steal them or trick GoDaddy employees into making critical changes.

Former GoDaddy employee Tony Perez, who sold his company Securi to GoDaddy, opined:

Hurt feelings aside, I hope GoDaddy continues to run these tests until it’s unable to dupe any of its employees.

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