Domain Name Wire | Domain Name News & Website Stuff

Domain Name Industry News and Website Stuff

Featured Domains

New .Com Winners & Losers

by — Domain Registrars 2 Comments

NameSilo jumps on monthly list.

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

The only notable movement was NameSilo, which jumped from #10 to #6 on the monthly report. It’s currently the 11th largest .com registrar. You can read an interview with NameSilo’s CEO here.

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

1. GoDaddy.com* (NYSE: GDDY) 865,438 (893,103 in October)
2. Alibaba (HiChina) 312,227 (204,213)
3. Tucows** (NASDAQ:TCX) 175,148 (183,542)
4. NameCheap Inc. 157,607 (139,033)
5. Xin Net Technology Corporation 152,143 (135,590)
6. NameSilo (CSE:URL) 130,713 (68,758)
7. Endurance+ (NASDAQ: EIGI) 123,087 (130,915)
8. Web.com++ 97,702 (105,815)
9. Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) 88,236 (92,312)
10. United Internet^ (FRA: UTDI) 66,501 (71,257)

Here’s the leaderboard of the top registrars in terms of total .com registrations as of the end of November 2018.

1. GoDaddy* 49,370,531 (49,222,603 in October)
2. Tucows** 12,659,835 (12,709,575)
3. Endurance+ 7,179,580 (7,240,990)
4. Web.com++ 6,732,478 (6,730,384)
5. Alibaba 6,192,801 (5,972,559)
6. United Internet^ 5,666,856 (5,675,949)
7. Namecheap 4,515,221 (4,452,551)
8. Xin Net Technology Corporation 2,792,514 (2,639,761)
9. Google 2,057,844 (2,005,816)
10. GMO 1,964,580 (1,975,188)

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
^ Includes 1&1, PSI, Cronon, United-Domains, Arsys and world4you

Namecheap hits 200,000 domain milestone in Namecheap University program

by — Domain Registrars 1 Comment

Domain registrar gives free .me domain name and online tools to students.

Domain name registrar Namecheap has hit a big milestone in its Namecheap University program: 200,000 free .Me domain names.

The program offers students and educators a free .me domain name and online tools for one year.

Namecheap launched the initiative in 2014. It is available to all students, teachers, administrators and educators with a .edu email address in North America, the UK and Australia.

The registrar says the program has been integrated into the curriculum of several high school and college computer science classes.

This seems like a smart program for Namecheap. Many technology companies (e.g. Apple, Microsoft) offer student discounts as a way to introduce young people to their products and make them lifelong customers.

Google Domains tops 2 million .com domains

by — Domain Registrars 6 Comments

Google’s registrar now the ninth biggest for .com domain names.

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

As forecasted, Google Domains has surpassed GMO to become the 9th largest registrar for .com domains. As of the end of October it had over 2 million .com domains under management.

Starting this month I’m combining United Internet’s main registrars to include more than just 1&1.

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

1. GoDaddy.com* (NYSE: GDDY) 893,103 (868,031 in September)
2. Alibaba (HiChina) 204,213 (133,156)
3. Tucows** (NASDAQ:TCX) 183,542 (174,114)
4. NameCheap Inc. 139,033 (139,581)
5. Xin Net Technology Corporation 135,590 (170,284)
6. Endurance+ (NASDAQ: EIGI) 130,915 (143,179)
7. Web.com++ 105,815 (99,859)
8. Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) 92,312 (85,550)
9. United Internet^ 71,257
10. NameSilo 68,758 (88,409)

Here’s the leaderboard of the top registrars in terms of total .com registrations as of the end of October 2018.

1. GoDaddy* 49,222,603 (49,079,269 in September)
2. Tucows** 12,709,575 (12,751,782)
3. Endurance+ 7,240,990 (7,335,322)
4. Web.com++ 6,730,384 (6,722,165)
5. Alibaba 5,972,559 (5,852,659)
6. United Internet^ 5,675,949 (3,688,497)
7. Namecheap 4,452,551 (4,405,568)
8. Xin Net Technology Corporation 2,639,761 (2,522,185)
9. Google 2,005,816 (1,953,943)
10. GMO 1,975,188 (1,979,668)

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
^ Includes 1&1, PSI, Cronon, United-Domains, Arsys and world4you

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.

Namecheap releases interesting data about domain registrations

by — Domain Registrars 3 Comments

Report looks and recent and historical data on domain registrations at the registrar.

Namecheap released a report today with data about its customers and their choice of top level domain names. The report includes data from the past ten years as well as more recent data incorporating new top level domains.

It can be difficult to compare registration data that doesn’t take into consideration the price of domain names; indeed, Namecheap excluded .xyz and Famous Four Media’s domains from some of its calculations.

Here’s what I found interesting:

1. .US was within the top three most-registered country code domains among Namecheaps customers from January 2017-June 2018. That’s not a huge surprise. The surprise is that it’s among the top three for registrants from Asia, Europe, Africa and South America in addition to the United States. It’s the #1 country code domain amongst Namecheap’s Asian customers. Perhaps promotions played a role.

2. Over the past ten years, June has been the most active month for domain registrations at Namecheap. November and October are #2 and #3, respectively.

3. Nearly half of Namecheap’s customers have registered just one domain with the company:

The full report is available to download on Namecheap’s website.