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Uniregistry is now Uni

by — Domain Registrars 28 Comments

Domain name registrar changes to shorter name.

Frank Schilling’s Uniregistry has changed its brand name to simply Uni.

The move coincided with the launch of a new app last week that makes it easy for users to get email or create a website.

On November 28, the company filed a trademark application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for Uni for several services including domain names, email and web hosting.

Intriguingly for a domain name company, it does not own Uni.com. That domain is owned by an Italian non-profit. For now, the website is still at Uniregistry.com.

While the logo on Uniregistry.com has changed to Uni, you’ll still find references to Uniregistry throughout the site and in emails the company sends.

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Tutorial: How to retrieve a list of your GoDaddy Domains

by — Domain Registrars 2 Comments

Alvin Brown provides a tutorial on retrieving a list of domains from your GoDaddy account using GoDaddy’s API.

If you’re not familiar with GoDaddy’s Application Programming Interface (API), then you’re missing out on a great opportunity to streamline the management of your GoDaddy domain portfolio.

Why would anyone ever consider using GoDaddy’s API to manage my domain portfolio when GoDaddy provides a user-friendly Domain Manager experience?  That’s the question I hope to reveal and answer in today’s tutorial.
[Read more…]

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.Com Winners: Some shakeup in the top 10

by — Domain Registrars 0 Comments

Top 10 registrars juggle places in latest monthly report.

ICANN has published the latest official data from Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN) about the .com registry. This registrar-by-registrar report covers August 2018.

Note that HiChina is now listed as Alibaba in the official reports, so I’ve changed the name on this report.

Here’s how registrars did in terms of new .com registrations. There was a bit of shifting as Endurance had a good month and NameSilo dropped a bit.

1. GoDaddy.com* (NYSE: GDDY) 920,365 (916,032 in July)
2. Alibaba (HiChina) 224,383 (237,296)
3. Tucows** (NASDAQ:TCX) 200,563 (212,279)
4. Endurance+ (NASDAQ: EIGI) 153,130 (127,916)
5. Xin Net Technology Corporation 144,999 (129,492)
6. NameCheap Inc. 139,914 (124,011)
7. Web.com++ 103,022 (93,535)
8. Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) 95,841 (94,033)
9. NameSilo 86,955 (127,451)
10. 1&1 47,333 (not in top 10)

Here’s the leaderboard of the top registrars in terms of total .com registrations as of the end of August 2018. There were no changes, but I suspect that once we see the October or November report, Google will have surpassed GMO.

1. GoDaddy* 48,907,328 (48,659,723 in July)
2. Tucows** 12,816,784 (12,834,441)
3. Endurance+ 7,357,344 (7,411,874)
4. Web.com++ 6,722,545 (6,721,550)
5. Alibaba 5,813,977 (5,683,428)
6. Namecheap 4,354,411 (4,312,430)
7. 1&1 3,701,944 (3,716,477)
8. Xin Net Technology Corporation 2,376,346 (2,260,541)
9. GMO 1,993,491 (2,011,266)
10. Google 1,903,695 (1,840,869)

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

* Includes GoDaddy and Wild West Domains
** Includes Tucows and Enom
+ Includes PDR, Domain.com, FastDomain and Bigrock. There are other Endurance registrars, but these are the biggest.
++ Includes Network Solutions and Register.com

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50 cent domains at Network Solutions? Not so fast

by — Domain Registrars 4 Comments

Promo offers cheap domains but they aren’t as inexpensive as they look.

Network Solutions sent out a Cyber Monday special that looks tempting: Up to 5 .com, .net, .biz, .info or .org domains for only 50 cents each.

The devil is in the very fine print:

Domains transferred out prior to one year renewal will be subject to a $20 fee per domain

In other words, the special offer is for 50 cents for the first year of a two-year registration, so it’s not really a 50 cent registration. At $35 for the second year, the special is two years of domain registration for $17.75 per year or one for $20.50. That’s not so good when you look at it that way.

It’s similar to the Cyber Monday deal at Network Solutions last year.

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Namecheap and Tucows settle legal dispute

by — Domain Registrars 0 Comments

Transfer dispute was resolved in a legal settlement.

Namecheap and Tucows (NASDAQ: TCX) have entered into a settlement agreement to resolve a transfer dispute.

Namecheap, a former Enom reseller, sued Tucows (which now owns Enom) because it said that Tucows was dragging its feet over transferring millions of domain names to Namecheap. Tucows said it was just a matter of using the appropriate mechanism to transfer the domains.

Following a court order, Tucows transferred 2.65 million domains to Namecheap in January 2018. It then entered into a settlement agreement with Namecheap in September 2018, under which Namecheap agreed to pay an “administrative fee” to Tucows for services related to the transfer. Tucows transferred a further 0.24 million domains later that month. The company will transfer the remaining 0.4 million domains to Namecheap in the fourth quarter.

The net-net: Namecheap eventually got the names transferred the way it wanted and Tucows got at least some of the costs covered.

The settlement was disclosed in Tucows’ 10-Q filed with the SEC yesterday.

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