The Fix

NameTerrific is opening its doors today.

I’ve been working on this startup for almost 8 months. The idea behind it is simple – let’s change how people deal with domain names completely. I want to build something awesome.

Since I registered my first domain when I was 12 (for the record, I’m 18 this year), the whole industry never stopped making me sick. Here’s the list of problems that I’ve experienced:

  • Unscalable DNS servers. I have no idea how many domains the big elephants cram into their servers without thinking about scalability. Even GoDaddy admits themselves that “the inability to access a website is related to DNS issues 30% of the time” on their Premium DNS page.
  • Unethical parking. I’m a perfectionist, and when I register a domain, I expect it to be new. I appreciate the “Website in construction” messages, but they almost always come with irrelevant and ugly ads.
  • Hijacking. Some registrars (I don’t want to name them) hijack empty DNS records to direct users who made a typo on the subdomain (like “ww” or “lbog”) to their ads.
  • Exorbitant registration fees. This happens with some small registrars and some resellers that are targeting people from traditional businesses who have no idea how much a domain costs. Or they bundle with some useless SEO services.
  • Endless upselling. It somehow becomes an industry norm that registrars make profits on hosting and other services and sell domains at cost. I’m not sure how much time (and real productivity) has been wasted on clicking “No Thanks”.

It doesn’t make sense to save a few dollars a year and go through the bad-registrar-torture. My startup thinking kicked in and here’s the fix:

  • TerrificDNS. This is a backend-neutral DNS management platform. Basically it gives you a web UI and an API to manage domain records, and it automatically pushes the changes to a backend you choose.
  • Currently NameTerrific has two backends — Standard and Cloud. The Standard backend is a set of Unicast PowerDNS nodes hooked to Redis instances (super-fast in-memory data store). The Cloud backend is simply Amazon Route 53.
  • Domain is all NameTerrific does. No hosting, ever.
  • No parking. No ads. No upselling. No hijacking.
  • Reasonable and relatively cheap all-included prices. If you use Anycast you may be charged a small usage fee, and NameTerrific Pro is a flat $24.95/month. Our promise: we won’t charge you for anything not listed in the less-than-two-screen Pricing page.
  • Friendly features. Snippets, Profiles, Domain Admins, Push and the coming-soon APIs suddenly open endless opportunities for you to efficiently manage your domains.
  • Intuitive and elegant user interface. It’s all about experience, really. Almost all users who signed up for the Beta loved NameTerrific’s user experience, and I hope you will too.
  • Awesome support. Don’t know how to set up your new hosting? No problem, email us and we will get it done for you. We will help you for literally anything domain-related.

To get started, NameTerrific processes all domain registrations through eNom, a large and trustworthy registrar. At the same time, we can imagine being a registrar ourselves and do even more awesome things in the foreseeable future.

NameTerrific extends the reach of professional domain services to startups and geeks with limited budget. We’ll keep working on it and your feedback will certainly be valuable. Please email us at [email protected] for any suggestions or ideas to help us move forward.

One more thing: An exclusive offer to new users

If you sign up for NameTerrific and upgrade to NameTerrific Pro in 2012 (that is, before December 31, 2012), you can immediately enjoy a 3-month free trial. There’s no catch. We will email you a week before your trial ends and see whether you want to continue the subscription.

If you’ve read this far, you should take a look at NameTerrific and probably like us on Facebook.

Ryan

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