For the second time in a row, one of my domain names has been denied an SSL certificate because of it’s domain name. But, this second time, the website went down without warning, despite being on CloudFlare. [Read more…]

GoDaddy has signed an agreement for the sale of its PlusServer business to funds advised by BC Partners for $456 million (€397 million). As part of the transaction, PlusServer will assume liabilities of €23 million and retain existing cash on the balance sheet of €12 million. The deal is expected to close by the end of August pending regulatory approval. [Read more…]

The New gTLD domain names have been available for a few years now. As you may know by know, I have done new gTLD research in the past because I’m generally interested in the New gTLDs from a marketing perspective. I’m not as interested in them from a domain investor perspective. Thanks to NTLD Stats, we can see how many domain names have been registered for each New TLD. That’s helpful, from many standpoints. We know which TLDs are selling. [Read more…]

Domain registries Donuts and Rightside are combining, with Donuts, Inc. acquiring Rightside Group for a purchase price of $213m. Rightside will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Donuts, which is a privately-held company. Rightside’s common shares will no longer be listed on any public market. [Read more…]

The .XYZ Registry has launched 1.111B Class, a new ongoing promotion for certain .XYZ domain names. Every domain name that’s a 6-digit, 7-digit, 8-digit, and 9-digit numeric .xyz domain will be $.99 cents to register, renew, and transfer. And that’s just not for the first year–it’s forever. That 1.111 billion domain names, thus this promotion is called “1.111B Class”. [Read more…]

Back in 2011, I reported that Microsoft bought a series of 49 domain names on one day–but what was most interesting to me was that they bought 8 SEO domain names, primarily Bing SEO domain names. These were mainly to protect their brand, I suspect. Here’s a list of the SEO-related domain names that they bought that day: [Read more…]

Have you bought a domain name, without doing the proper domain name due diligence, and put a developed it–to then find out that it’s banned in Google or has a search engine penalty? Well, according to a recent post a Search Engine Roundtable, there are people discussing this very issue. [Read more…]

I’ve written several times about various domain name email spam (scams) out there. There is one in particular, now, that seems to be very persistent with their sending of emails. The Subject of the email that you receive is usually “DomainName.com Notification” where “DomainName.com” is the name of a domain name that you own. The scam is the essentially the same–they’re trying to get you to worry that you have not paid for “search engine optimization submission expiration of your domain”. [Read more…]

As I previously reported, Apple is registering nonsense domain names and then deleting them after three years. This latest round of dropped and deleted domain names involves 21 domain names. [Read more…]

In this mobile-first world that we’re in, emojis like 😉 and 🙂 are becoming increasingly popular. Google’s search results do, in fact, support emoji characters. Especially in domain names. And, since we’re all using our mobile phones now, and have emoji keyboards built into our phones, it only make sense to consider an emoji domain. [Read more…]