Twenty-two years ago I opened an eNom account as a subseller, allowing me to register domains at a lower price. It also gave me other benefits, such as registering and managing domains for clients. eNom was fresh and a smart choice, away from the mediocrity of GoDaddy and Network Solutions at the time. Even Stargate, a cheap alternative, was riddled with issues and eNom felt in general more secure. The interface provided access to all the features without visual clutter or complexity. There was no 2FA of course, none of this appeared until the redesign of eNom.com in the mid 2000's. Even when Tucows acquired eNom in 2017, only the front-end changed while the control panel remained the same. It was time to move on. My only remaining domain with eNom, a .co.uk no less, was … [Continue reading]
Dan.com: The final exodus
Migration is not a great word to use when forcing the end of life of a service that was useful to many. In the literal sense, migration reeks of physical violence and war turmoil, of broken families and refugees. A migration is typically done not by choice. GoDaddy migrated our Uniregistry account to their own system 18 months ago. In the months since these domains were moved away from GoDaddy; it wasn't a migration, it was an exodus—a voluntary, organized exit which was necessary. As of October 16th, Dan.com won't exist as we known it. I heard that some Dan.com accounts are already witnessing some type of forced redirect to Afternic pages. The time for the new exodus is now. You can download your data from Dan.com by going here. By far, the most useful of all are the … [Continue reading]
Concepts of a plan: How Afternic’s ever-beta platform became the norm
Afternic is a ghost platform, operated by GoDaddy. It was a dedicated web site where both sellers and buyers could interact, buying and selling domains respectively. A few months ago, GoDaddy disabled the ability of buyers to search the Afternic domain inventory directly. That search was replaced by the same search form that one can use on GoDaddy.com to find and register domain names. By moving the Afternic search to GoDaddy.com, the company gave up its multi-year attempts to fix an ageing platform. Its original concepts of a plan for Afternic 2.0 did not include a deadline; it was an open-ended commitment that was never truly binding. What GoDaddy achieved was to litter its domain search with a stream of worthless second and third tier domains recommended by its buggy AI. … [Continue reading]
Dan.com: It’s still a great platform to sell domains on
Today, GoDaddy announced the availability of native LTO landing pages on Afternic, replacing the "Dan style" landers that it offered there. The timing is odd, considering that I've been testing the … [Continue reading]
GoDaddy expired domain acquisitions: A long leap of faith
After 25 years of using GoDaddy as a domain registrar on an as-needed basis, I'm not surprised by the lack of effective process logic. Perhaps the best thing that ever happened to the biggest … [Continue reading]
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