Network Solutions used to be the only place you could go to buy a .com or other domain name. Years ago they lost their monopoly rights and a flood of low priced competitors entered the market. Today Network Solutions is a distant third in market share behind giants like GoDaddy and eNom. The main reason is price. Network Solutions continues to charge $35/year for a domain name, while others charge as little as $8 per year.
Network Solutions continues to make good money on renewals for all the domain names already registered to them (transferring to a new registrar is a pain), but few new customers come their way. Recently, though, they implemented a new “feature” that is designed to force some users to register domains with them.
As of Tuesday, if a user does a search on the site for a domain name, Network Solution immediately registers the domain in their own name. If the user then goes to a discount registrar to register the domain, it shows as unavailable. The user must then either not buy the domain, or go back to Network Solutions and pay their $35/year fee.
So far they’ve registered over 72,000 domain names based on user searches. They are all temporarily assigned a name server of “reserveddomainname” – the number of registrations pointing to this server is public data and can be seen here.
Was reading about this on ABW forum yesterday actually, very, very shitty indeed.
And to think that someone in their business development or marketing team came up with this gem as a bright idea to get new clients. Sheesh.
The good news is that this is going to bite them in the ass bigtime as people find out about this.
Not such a cool play from their behalf. It’s obvious to everyone that all the .com’s are being eaten up, but this really doesn’t help the matter.
I use Godaddy always and they are fortunately not doing this, well not yet at least.
It will, yes, might as well write a script which does tons of searches on their site for nonsense domain names and get them to register them all :P
I have always thought this may be a cool idea, but then again it will backfire. Thats why I haven’t implemented it. Also it can get a bit expensive.
Ye, I agree. I just find it sad that domains are starting to become real estate now, I can never find a single .com available and end up settling for junk ones :(
Wow, Chris, you sure do post about a range of topics. I use GoDaddy for most of my stuff. While shoo’ing the wind this morning with a techie, I was surprised that he hadn’t heard of GoDaddy.
Do you use GoDaddy for Imod.co.za? If so, where did you register it?
Niche blogging is a great concept and one which I think adds value to a blog, but iMod is just my little personal space on the Internet, so it’s all the things I am interested in and some random things I come across which interest me.
I have my own servers, which I host on and I register the odd .com domain via GoDaddy. I don’t use GoDaddy for .co.za domain names, that I do myself, part of what I offer my clients basically.
Strange that your techie friends didn’t know GoDaddy!
this is a @#!$# outrage. i’ve ‘lost’ 4 domains this way already: 2 clients and 2 personal. i think this has been going on longer than tuesday though, as when i read your post i had ‘oh that’s been happening’ feeling..
thanks for posting this.
ahahaha. the 1st time in about 6 months i try and digg something (this url) and i get this message:
This URL has been widely reported by users as being regularly used to spam Digg’s submission process and cannot be submitted at this time.
i’m reminded of that cry-wolf fairy tale.
Hi Alan, I agree, losing domains is completely nonesense and it’s completely unfair to all of us. These hosting shops need to sort their shit out already!
I’ve been ‘banned’ from Digg for many many months, and I have still not heard why *shakes head* Thanks for trying tho – stumble it rather ;)
Ha, i have the funniest example.
My first name was made up by my folks years ago, using a combination of other names and has absolutely no meaning and is 100% unique. To date there are no OTHER ppl with my first name, unless it was copied and i have spent a hellava long checking up on this.
“Deshantan” Can u believe that some twat has deshantan.com. AND i tried to register a CC and the same thing happened!
“Deshantan’s Electronic Environments” is taken! what the hell are the odds of THAT happening???
Sheesh, what is the usual spelling of your name because I’m sure I’ve heard it before.. ?
That’s seriously annoying, I think in my case, I just don’t bother looking for domains or CC’s with Christopher :P
i just searched for networksolutionssuck.com ;-)
Haha, I should contact them and tell them :P