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.AI domain name moves to CoCCA, which should spur adoption

by — Domain Registrars 1 Comment

EPP automates many .AI transactions people take for granted with other domains.

Anguilla’s country code domain name .AI has become popular in recent years thanks to artificial intelligence companies. Now the domain has a bit of intelligence itself.

The domain name registry has moved to the Council of Country Code Administrators (CoCCA) platform, which means that many transactions that were previously manual can be achieved using Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP).

Previously, registrars had to perform transactions on a .AI web page. Many updates were handled manually by the registry, which is managed by one person on the tiny island of 15,000 people. Nameserver updates were performed once a day on weekdays, for example.

And if a hurricane hit the island, all bets were off.

Moving to CoCCA might also give the registry more resiliency in its DNS infrastructure.

As part of the move to CoCCA, individuals can no longer register domains directly through the registry. Since many registrars already offer domains on CoCCA, you can expect more to start offering .AI domain names for sale. One such registrar that recently added .AI is Hexonet (1api). A full list of supporting registrars is here.

Domain names can be transferred between registrars. However, there is a transfer fee equal to a new registration that does not add years to the registration. So it’s unlikely people will transfer registrars to get lower registration fees.

The wholesale cost of a .AI domain is $100 for two years.

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Google is now one of the Top 10 .com registrars

by — Domain Registrars 4 Comments

Google Domains finishes 2017 among the top 10 domain name registrars for .com.

Google Domains is now a top 10 registrar for .com domains.

Google launched its domain name registrar in the middle of 2014. It grew quickly and is now among the top 10 registrars in the world for .com domain registrations as of the end of last year. It surpassed OVH in the latest official data from Verisign.

The data are from Verisign’s (VRSN) most recent official breakdown of domain transactions by registrar, which concludes December 2017.

There are four main reasons I believe Google Domains has grown so quickly:

1. It got a great ranking on Google for key terms. Go figure.
2. It can spend whatever it wants on Google Adwords. Take money from one pocket and put it in another.
3. Cross marketing between other Google products/services.
4. Brand trust and recognition.

One curious thing about Google Domains is that it only accepts one-year registrations.

In December, these were the top 10 registrars in terms of new .com registrations: Click here to continue reading…

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GoDaddy chooses Amazon AWS

by — Domain Registrars 0 Comments

GoDaddy selects Amazon AWS for cloud.

About a half year after it announced it was planning to move from its own infrastructure to the public cloud, GoDaddy and Amazon announced today that it has selected AWS. The move will offload significant infrastructure to Amazon. Here are my thoughts on this move:

1. Moving to AWS will give GoDaddy instant tech credibility

Many people blame website problems on GoDaddy’s constantly aging infrastructure. Moving to AWS eliminates the need to manage this infrastructure and also gives the company’s hosting plans the credibility of being on the market-leading cloud provider. I often hear people blame GoDaddy and its aging infrastructure for website problems. Once hosting is on AWS, the underlying infrastructure shouldn’t be an issue. (Of course, there’s a management layer on top of it.)

2. GoDaddy was right to abandon its own cloud efforts

GoDaddy has taken two stabs at offering its own cloud services to customers. These efforts did not jive with the company’s stated mission of helping really small businesses. These businesses don’t need an AWS-like service; they need simple hosting and site creation.

3. The deal has reciprocal elements that could help GoDaddy’s core business.

According to the release:

“GoDaddy and AWS are working together to incorporate some of GoDaddy’s domain technology and website building products—Managed WordPress and GoCentral—into the AWS experience to provide AWS customers with an array of tools for quickly finding the perfect domain name and building a powerful online presence.”

Amazon sells everything and already offers domain names through some of its AWS services. Why not also promote domain registration and website building through Amazon? Depending on how this is structured it could be huge for GoDaddy. It could also help the domain name industry.

4. The PR mentions domain appraisals.

I was a bit surprised that the press release mentioned domain name appraisals:

“GoDaddy is also using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) P3 Instances—the most powerful graphics processing unit (GPU) instances available in the cloud—to substantially reduce the time it takes to train machine learning models and increase the performance of its GoDaddy Domain Appraisals tool that helps customers understand the value of their domains.”

I wonder if AWS wanted this included to promote its technology for making machine learning faster.

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GoDaddy gets patent for text-based domain name renewal

by — Domain Registrars 3 Comments

System would make it easy for people to renew domains using a third-party texting service.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued patent number 9,929,995 (pdf) to GoDaddy for “Third party messaging system for monitoring and managing domain names and websites.”

The patent is a continuation of an earlier one the company filed for allowing people to make changes to a website via text message.

This latest patent covers technology that would allow GoDaddy to communicate with customers via SMS, app or a third-party social network to help them renew their domain name or expand their webhosting package.

For example, if a customer’s domain is about to renew, GoDaddy could send a text message to the customer and ask if they want to renew it. They could respond ‘yes’ to renew the domain automatically, or ‘no’ if they want to let it expire.

On the hosting side, GoDaddy can send a message to the customer if they are about to exceed one of their quotas and give them the option to upgrade their hosting package.

This is somewhat like a chatbot. When an ad campaign on Facebook expires the company starts a Facebook Messenger chat with the advertiser that lets them get stats and extend their ad campaign by typing plain English words.

GoDaddy Chief Architect Arnold Blinn and former Sr. Director of Product Management Nitin Gupta are listed on the patent as inventors.

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Is this GoDaddy’s new slogan? 2018 edition

by — Domain Registrars 1 Comment

Company files trademark and acquires domain name for Make Your Own Way.

Back in 2013 I wrote a post titled “Is this GoDaddy’s new slogan?”

The company had filed two intent-to-use trademark applications. One was for “Name It. Make It. Own It.” and the other for “It’s Go Time”.

GoDaddy ended up adopting “It’s Go Time”.

The slogan was a nice play on the Go in GoDaddy but was fairly generic. So generic, in fact, that another hosting company sued GoDaddy because it said it had been using the phrase before GoDaddy. (The two parties settled in 2016.)

Now it seems that GoDaddy is getting ready to unveil a new tagline. On Sunday the company filed an intent-to-use trademark application for “Make Your Own Way” that covers many goods and services.

GoDaddy also acquired the domain name MakeYourOwnWay.com from domain investor Mike Mann. The domain has been transferred to Carlos Becerra, Senior IP Enforcement Manager for GoDaddy. The domain was listed for sale for $19,888.

Make Your Own Way is a nice tagline that fits GoDaddy’s stated mission of helping solopreneurs and very small businesses.

 

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