Thread

Every time I check for certain domain names, the domains are registered about an hour or two later. What’s going on here?

It’s called frontrunning, nothing new there. See this article for some details. Domains are generally dropped again within a few days, before the deal becomes final.

What are you using to check if a domain is available, Godaddy?

Network Solutions steals domain ideas

Is it still safe to do a whois search from my terminal.app?

I used Network Solutions the first time I registered a domain, but I had to switch registrars when NetSol wouldn’t respond to my attempts to move my domain to a new host.

Once I’d gone to another registrar the host move went perfectly—and then NetSol responded to my move attempts with notice that they couldn’t move the domain because they were no longer my registrar.

I have avoided NetSol ever since.

The other registrar fouled up on me more recently so I fired them too. At present all my domain work is through GoDaddy.

Liked GoDaddy but they sure have been getting a bunch of bad press lately.

I’ve used Namecheap for years. They do what you want and nothing you don’t want. No upselling, no spam, no funny business. Not the cheapest registrar but I’ve had zero hassles with them.

Liked GoDaddy but they sure have been getting a bunch of bad press lately.

In my experience their bad press is very much deserved. I was a long time godaddy customer until they have tried to rip me off one day. Now I use dotster and am very happy with them.

Now I use dotster

I haven’t used them yet but know several that do and seem happy.

domainsite.com has been good for me. I’ve got 20+ domains with them for 5 or more years without a hitch.

To check domain availability I use whois from the mac terminal to avoid exactly these scams.

Network Solutions just did this very thing to me.

I’d like to choke ‘em.

Doug

Is it still safe to do a whois search from my terminal.app?

Absolutely. Only some registrars do the frontrunning thing.

I registered saggyfunbags.com with Network Solutions just to see them register it. When it broke that they were doing this, people were looking up things like, networksolutionsareunethicalasses.com and such. I don’t think they’ll get it.

I wrote about this just the other day:

website_addiction

I use pairNIC.com for all my registrations, but mostly because I host at pair.com. Their customer service rocks, and they are easy to use.

And for the record, they don’t do front running.