Apple has deleted over 500 domain names this week, and decided not to renew these domain names. Most of these domain names were registered by Apple exactly one year ago, and after coming up for renewal they have not renewed them.
To be exact, 527 domain names owned by Apple were not renewed on December 11th, when they came up for renewal. Many of these domain names were nonsense domain names, and didn’t really make any sense. For example, one of the domain names, ckdhxvnithfr.net doesn’t appear to be related to any particular product or service that Apple offers, or may even offer in the future.
Here’s the whois record for ckdhxvnithfr.net:
Registrar CSC CORPORATE DOMAINS, INC.
Registrar Status redemptionPeriod
Dates Created on 2013-12-11 – Expires on 2014-12-11 – Updated on 2014-12-08
Name Server(s) NSERVER.APPLE.COM (has 2,449 domains)
NSERVER2.APPLE.COM (has 2,449 domains)
NSERVER3.APPLE.COM (has 2,449 domains)
NSERVER4.APPLE.COM (has 2,449 domains)
IP Address 54.165.144.55 – 2,409 other sites hosted on this server
IP Location United States – Virginia – Ashburn – Amazon Technologies Inc.
ASN United States AS14618 AMAZON-AES – Amazon.com, Inc.,US (registered Nov 04, 2005)
Domain Status On-hold (redemption Period)
Whois History 8 records have been archived since 2013-12-11
IP History 2 changes on 3 unique IP addresses over 0 years
Registrar History 1 registrar
Hosting History 2 changes on 2 unique name servers over 1 year
Whois Server whois.corporatedomains.com
There’s been speculation about whether or not these domain names were part of a test, or if they were part of an iCloud or cloud-type of service.
As you may recall, I originally broke this story back last year when I started noticing all of these nonsense domain names that were hosted on Amazon’s servers.
Here are some of the domain names that Apple didn’t renew:
abiwhjgoyviaxgn.com
abiwhjgoyviaxgn.info
abiwhjgoyviaxgn.net
absynotbxglspe.com
absynotbxglspe.info
absynotbxglspe.net
aeuoxdaucpvabsl.info
aeuoxdaucpvabsl.net
aihnosajuygrndb.com
aihnosajuygrndb.info
aihnosajuygrndb.net
aiucjxxwxkey.com
aiucjxxwxkey.info
aiucjxxwxkey.net
As far as I can tell, these sites were live to the public for only a short period of time, and they don’t appear to have been archived in the archive.org site. Furthermore, they don’t appear to have been indexed in Google. So, since these are not being renewed, we just may never know why Apple registered over 500 domain names and put them on Amazon servers.
Since those domain names were never really used by Apple, or at least in the public they weren’t even indexed in Google, I don’t think they have any value at all, and most likely will not have any traffic going to them. So, I wouldn’t try to pick up any of them on the domain name aftermarket or even register them when they become available in 90 days.