A praise for Afternic

As a domain investor, I've never used Afternic intentionally before to sell domains. It was always due to GoDaddy acquiring Uniregistry and Dan that I got to experience a range of annoying woes of being on the Afternic platform as a domain seller. As a domain buyer, I was far less concerned about the lack of bells and whistles and I did use Afternic for that purpose without any issues. After deciding to give Afternic a test run for 30 days, I have to say I'm far from being disappointed. The transition of my domain portfolio from Dan to Afternic took place without any major issues, although I had to hand-verify a dozen domains by using my allocated DNS - a trick that Dan used to perfection. In the two weeks or so since, I've had approximately 10 leads and one domain sale. The latter … [Continue reading]

eNom: End of an era & the fastest domain transfer ever

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 … [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]