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The Ascendancy of .co

Posted by kdawson on from the milking-the-cash-cow dept.

An anonymous reader tipped the fact that, with the .com namespace getting pretty well mined out, GoDaddy.com's front page for domain registrations now defaults to .co instead of .com. The article claims that GoDaddy registers about half of new domain names. Neither the article nor GoDaddy makes it explicit that .co is a ccTLD belonging to Colombia, or that registering one costs about three times as much as a .com, at $29.99 per year. And if you select a .co domain name from GoDaddy's front page, a number of TLD variants are presented alongside .co — but .com is not among them.

3 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. It's not mined out. by bmo · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's squatted, sniped, tasted, and front-run out.

    When a speculator can register thousands of names and move them around for free by playing the system, is there any wonder that .com is "mined out"? When a registrar front-runs domain names (Network Solutions) and fills the space with reserved names for itself, is there any wonder that .com is "mined out"?

    Get rid of domain tasting and other shenanigans and the problem will go away.

    --
    BMO

    1. Re:It's not mined out. by Raenex · · Score: 5, Informative

      Get rid of domain tasting

      It's pretty much gone:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting

      "ICANN reported in August 2009, that prior to implementing excess domain deletion charges, the peak month for domain tastings was over 15 million domain names. After the $0.20 fee was implemented, this dropped to around 2 million domain names per month. As a result of the further increase in charges for excess domain deletions, implemented starting April 2009, the number of domain tastings dropped to below 60 thousand per month."

      I know from personal experience that a domain I had let lapse and was sat on for years became available again after the ICANN policy was put in place.

  2. Namecheap by KingSkippus · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've been using Namecheap for years, and they've been pretty awesome. They have a nice set of DNS management tools, they notify me of all important things, and as their name implies, they're inexpensive.

    Another thing I like about Namecheap is that you can delegate control over your names to other people. I run a suite of hobby gaming web sites, and I've made contingency plans in case I get hit by a proverbial bus. (Or a real one.) I've given one of the other site admins permissions over the names so that if need be, he can manage them or even move them to another registrar. Obviously, I trust him implicitly, but the point is that if something happens to me, the names aren't just up for grabs once the registration expires. They may exist, but I don't know of another registrar that allows you to delegate permissions like this.

    I can't speak about their technical support; I've never had to use it.

    Just to prove I'm not a shill for the company (I'm only affiliated with them as being a customer), if there's one thing that's stupid about them, it's their name. I mean, "Namecheap"? Makes them sound so, I dunno, Wal-Martish, especially given what has been a good record so far with me.