As most domain investors know myself, Adam Dicker, Rick Schwartz and Page Howe have had a weekly show on DomainSherpa.com for many months were we discuss news and other things going on in the domain industry. On last Thursday’s DomainSherpa.com show, Adam Dicker said that he had just a few days before found the domain name registrar Hexonet.net and told the audience that he loved the customer service, support and that Hexonet was going to be his go to registrar and highly recommended them to the audience.
After Adam’s comment, I told the audience I agreed with Adam wholeheartedly and in fact had been moving my entire domain portfolio to Hexonet over the last 18+ months and that Hexonet was my registrar of choice and the vast majority of my new gTLD registrations had been done through Hexonet.
To be clear Hexonet did not pay us or compensate us in anyway for our recommendation and didn’t even know it was coming (even I didn’t know this discussion would be coming up).
We just gave our honest feedback on a company in the domain space that we both used.
During Yesterday’s DomainSherpa’s show, host Michael Cyger asked Adam and I if we had gotten any feedback from our comments regarding Hexonet and if people took our advice.
We responded we did get some personal feedback but that it was too early to tell how many people took our advice
However yesterday once the zone files for the new gTLD’s updated and the 25,000+ .Club domains got added to ntldstats.com, a couple of things on the Registrar side of the stats stood out.
For one Hexonet which had previously been around 15-17 in terms of registrar market share of new gTLD registrations had jumped up to number 5.
Looking at the registrar stats for just .Club which launched yesterday, Hexonet was actually the number 1 registrar for the extension with 7,788 registrations more than three times more than the next closest registrar which was Godaddy.com, which had almost 2,400 registrations. Hexonet did 40 times the registration volume on .Club than the second largest registrar in the world Enom did.
That is pretty amazing considering Godaddy has about 50% share of the domain registrar market, 25% of the registrar share of the new gTLD market (including many in-house registrations from Uniregistry) and that Godaddy has done a huge push for .Club to the extend the founders of .Club were sitting at Godaddy’s offices when .Club was launched.
So did two domain investors; two DomainSherpa’s move the entire new gTLD registrar market and possibly the domain registrar market itself.
Like I answered yesterday, its too early to tell but the numbers are pretty incredible.
Michael –
Don’t you have your own registrar
Movements in a small market can have seemingly large effects but it does not neutralise the fact that it is a small market.
Brian
I did have part ownership of a registrar but gave my shares to the other shareholder in 2012 or 2011 can’t remember right now, I’m old, and started moving all my domain names to Hexonet at that time.
They are all over there and are a part of the 2M domain names they recently announced the have under management.
So to answer your question directly
No
Yes John –
keeps us looking over our shoulders a bit
but that is good for business in general
It is a very early market, Brian,
That’s the problem with trying to measure such activity. Also considering all new gTLDs as one market can produce some strange results. HEXONET is a German registrar and one of the biggest new gTLDs is .BERLIN. What generally happens in a ccTLD (and some of these city/geo new gTLDs have more in common with ccTLDs than gTLDs) is that local registrars/hosters dominate the market. As a US facing gTLD market matures (and goes more retail rather than speculative/brand protection) is that anything from 23% to 40% can end up on Godaddy.
It is very important for any hoster/domainer to know their market. The problem is that in the wider scheme of things, there is no new gTLD market for the public yet. When you break down the new gTLDs on a country level basis, they don’t even have a significant share of their country level domain market. That .com/.ccTLD axis (which accounts for over 80% of the domains registered in most mature country level markets) is a very difficult thing to break. And it generally takes at least three years for proper registrar trends to emerge in new TLDs.
I do like when you check to see if a domain is available on Hexonet that it shows every other domain extension all on the same page.
I went to Hexonet.com first and it doesn’t resolve so proceeded to the net version. Looked up Hexonet.com and the same company owns it so why don’t they redirect to their site. Doesn’t make sense.
Personally I would rather keep my domains at a U.S. company since I am in the U.S. but I guess it doesn’t matter to some. I just feel like it’s best to support the companies from your own country first. Made in the USA and support the USA as much as possible. Why give a company from another country almost 1 million dollars in your registration fees. Keep the money in the U.S.
They have 20,761 在线 registrations and 5,541 中文网 registrations according to ntldstats.com’s statistics. Those registrations may also contributed to the jump-up. I don’t know who registered those Chinese domains there.
Domain
The government of China registered some 20K IDN domains in the two Chinese strings:
http://domainincite.com/16151-tld-registry-sells-20k-idn-gtld-names-to-chinese-gov
On the registrar side they are showing as being registered by:
Service Development Center of the State Commission for Public Sector Reform
they have a total of 17,034 domains
“Personally I would rather keep my domains at a U.S. company ”
Michael – your are at least one legal pro on this thread – are you comfortable with keeping your domains at a german registrar.
Personally I am not very comfortable with countries now that are reliant on Russia and not willing to play very hard with sanctions
Thanks a lot for the information.
Todd
Hexonet.net is the site they use.
They have a registrar in Canada and one in Germany but I respect you decision.
Honestly Hexonet for me was the best kept secret in the domain registrar business.
Adam brought it up and let the cat out of the bag so I had to then join in with my support although if you did whois searches on my domains or new gTLD’s its was easy to see who I was using.
I would say for myself I need to have a direct and personal connection to the operators of the registrar.
I had that with Moniker when Monte was around and I was another customer (obviously long before we became partners or ROTD was started) but I don’t like filing out support tickets and waiting for someone to answer.
I’m spoiled in that way and this is the first registrar i felt that had me covered that i could contact with an issue, question or problem on email or skype and I would get an answer in short order.
I assume Adam feels the same way and happy that they are now enjoying a lot of success.
Brian
Now that we know theour government is recording every call, text and email sent under the NSA, we know about wiki leaks, we know the US is wanting to give up control over ICANN, and the .com registry still sits for now in the US, I’m more than fine with a German or Canadian company that runs a registrar.
I still haven’t seen anywhere in the world that a governor of a state, or county or city, as in the case of Kentucky which ordered domain name seized, (which is still an ongoing case) or any country’s federal agency (except in the UK), order domain name seized, or actually taken domain names away from there owners
At the end of the day all registrars are all subject to UDRP, URS’s ; being sued in federal court and all the rest
What I care about is someone watching my ass, seeing a domain is being transferred out of my account or worse a lot of domains being transferred out who will call me and say Mike do you really want this 1,000 domains transferred out?
That’s my concern
I had that with Moniker back in the day.
Now I have it with Hexonet
My domains are not moving unless they confirm with me I want them to move.
As Adam Dicker said that is that is the real service, the real deal, the stuff that lets you sleep well at night.
My domains are not moving out until the owners of the company call me and ask me do you really want to transfer that domain?
That is the service I’m looking for and found in Hexonet
the rest is just noise
there are other registrars that could give you that: a second level of confirmation before transferring domains out.
on a side note, i always find it interesting to see a company who its core business are domains and use a poor domain. hexonet.net? come on…
How else do you raise the bar ?
Intensity dislike the little British, Little USA small minded BS, how do you help trade sanctions with no trade. Thanks Domain Sherpa.
If you choose a registrar outside of the US and you lose a UDRP for one or more of your domains, you may not necessarily have jurisdiction to appeal the adverse ruling through a declaratory judgment of non-infringement in a US federal court. There is no equivalent mechanism in other countries. Remember, the UDRP process requires the parties to choose the location of the registrar or the respondent. Many domain investors do not live in the US.
You can’t appeal a UDRP
You can file for a declaratory judgement before or after the UDRP is decided in the jurisdiction where the registrar is located or where the registrant is located unless one of our learned council’s who reads the domain tells me otherwise
So if you live in Florida like I do for example I believe I can file where the domain is registered or where the registrar is.
I don’t see it being any advantage to file in Arizona rather than Florida rather than Berlin
Mike, as you know, a declaratory judgment action is a unique creature of the American legal system. My point doesn’t apply to American citizens. If someone lives in the UK and its registrar is German, he or she will not be able to appeal an adverse ruling by way of a declaratory judgment in the US, which happens after the UDRP decision but also can be used before a decision because a declaratory judgment requires imminent harm and may be brought in a US court as soon as (a) receiving a cease and desist letter and/or (b) after the UDRP complaint is filed even before the time the respondent is due to file his or her answering brief.
KJB
I’m smart but that not smart I have no idea of what laws are all around the world.
I know what laws I’m governed by and what I as a domain owner can do.
If you live in Finland I have no idea
or over 180 countries
Check with any attorney
personally I’m fine if no one uses Hexonet
Not my company I don’t own it, don’t get any benefit if you use it or not
Everyone needs to do what they need to do based on all fact, conditions and laws where they reside and what their situations are
Michael how do you keep track of 75,000 domains? Do you go into your accounts daily and look at the domain totals in each account, and make sure they have not changed from the day before. How would you know if a domain was missing?
It’s a pain in the ass to keep track of a thousand domains. I can’t even imagine how it is to keep track of 75,000. Can you tell us your system.
that is why i need a registrar that will call me or contact me before domains get transferred out
Everything is on auto renew If you have the right partners its not a big deal
if you don’t its a nightmare
Mike, you ARE smart! This topic was something that Paul Keating and I discussed on a panel at Domaining Spain last year. I haven’t done a universal study of whether other countries have declaratory judgment type mechanisms, but insofar as I understand it, they don’t exist. Perhaps if Paul reads this, he will chime in.
Yep, the numbers are pretty incredible, because you guys are.
Frankly Mike I use Hexonet but I don’t like it:
Their control panel is full of random bugs and they always claim it is the “registry’s fault”.
Sometimes I can’t even pre-order a new gtld because of these bugs.
Their support is terrible. I got a reply yesterday 4 days after I started the ticket and then contacted them again.
Their billing/invoicing system is pretty bad randomly “skipping” invoices that are send all together at the end of each month.
They use auctions for dropped domains but not for the new gtlds.
They use an outside auction house and I can’t pay the auction house with the prepaid funds I have in hexonet. I need to pay it separately and they don’t accept credit cards. Invoicing is a mess.
I have to contact separate support for these auctions and the support is even worse than hexonet’s. Never replying for months!
Hexonet does not offer weekend support.
They take multiple pre-orders for new gtlds, they reserve your money and they don’t tell you if you have the top pre-order or not.
Need I continue?
I use them because not many people use them and they are successful sometimes catching domains. But I was also “using” and still using domainmonkeys and other registrars from snapnames, pool and namejet…
Regarding you question. No they didn’t change the market. These registrations were mostly from hexonet resellers at go live. Hexonet has a less than 1% market share in all the other new gtlds except a couple.
I have no doubt that people heard your discussion and some checked out Hexonet.
I think there’s something bigger going on here, though. This looks like one “big” buyer, and I think I know who it is. I’m doing some more digging.
@Allemann,
Congratulations on hiring Peterson; he writes with distinction, reason, and clarity. I look forward to checking out the output on your blog regularly.The Wire couldn’t find a better Contributor, and Peterson couldn’t write for a better blog.
Good luck. 5/8/14
I could not agree more with Konstantinos Zournas.
First time I used Hexonet about 4 years ago but I moved my domains away as their CP panel is horrible with many bugs. Everything seemed messy there and using their service I always felt like I moved 10 years back.
Also, I could never find any prom code to reduce bills.
“Did two domain sherpa`s…” sounds really funny.
I guess Michael you desire admiration, just build something worthwhile then you get it. For now you are just a domainer, maybe smarter than many but still domainer.
And I forgot to say that on many occasions they have told me that they don’t care about their retail channel but they rather focus on their resellers.
Do you really want all your domains to someone that tells you they don’t care about you?
Well they certainly care about me and care about Adam, not sure what experience you had and we are not a reseller.
I haven’t had any issues pre-ordering new gTLD’s
Your stats regarding Hexonet on previous new gTLD’s supports my argument that they had a much smaller market share of new gTLD’s before Sherpa show.
Maybe they care because you have 75,000 domains with them. They have made it perfectly clear that they don’t care about me and any comments I have made over the years.
I have had issues where every time I try to accept a tredemark claim I get an error. Hexonet support tells me that I can accept the claim AFTER the 5th day of EAP. And they tell me that on the 6th day of EAP because they don’t have support over the weekend. What a joke.
Mike these stats are not what they seem. I will have more on this on Monday.
And taking a single new gtld (with an irregular number of registrations) and making an assumption on all new tlds is not correct.
I have not yet finished research but up to now 98% of these Hexonet registrations were done by the same entity.
sounds like some important research… i started thinking i was the only one on the internet with incredibly too much time on my hands.
in fact, kinda bored right n———hey look, marijuana.
brb research
It will be interesting to what you find
I got less than 100 .club domains including those in landrush auctions
@Berkens
I presume that includes ROTD in the “I”, and Monte as well?
Domen
RightoftheDot.com is not a domainer company it doesn’t own any domains other than to operate it sites.
Any domains I acquire are for my company Worldwide Media, Inc which i own with my wife.
Monte may acquire domains for his own account I do not know what he is registering or buying but I don’t think its any substantial number of domains.
Here is the answer:
http://onlinedomain.com/2014/05/14/news/someone-registered-7572-club-domain-names-spending-more-than-110k/