Dynadot Official Thread

[Dynadot]

Hi all!

We’ve created this thread to make it easier to communicate with us here on Namepros, and we’ll also be posting regular updates on our offers and products. Please feel free to share any feedback and suggestions with us, or to let us know if there’s anything we can assist with.

We’d like to kick things off with an extension of our $7.99 .COM transfer sale, the code “COMTRANS4” has been extended until 23:59 PST on May 31, and there’s no limit on how many domains you can transfer using the code. Every month we have great prices on a wide selection of domains, and you can find a full list of our sales here:

https://www.dynadot.com/sales.html

We’re also excited to share that our CEO, Todd Han, will be hosting an AMA (Ask Me Anything) right here on Namepros in the near future, with more information on a date and time coming soon.

Dynadot is an ICANN accredited domain name registrar and web host headquartered in San Mateo, California. Founded in 2002 by a software engineer, our primary focus is engineering and design excellence. Our custom written, state-of-the-art domain and hosting software is stable, fast, and easy to use. From humble beginnings, we have grown steadily and now are home to over 2.6 million domains.

Our goal is to provide our customers with world class registration and hosting services for a reasonable price. Most of our site is fully automated, allowing us to offer some of the lowest prices in the industry. At the same time we strive to provide excellent customer service, and helpful responses to all questions. If anything is not to your satisfaction, feel free to contact us, and we will do our best to resolve the situation.

We individually respond to every email we receive - no cut and paste responses. Customer service is handled by highly trained customer service representatives that work closely with our software engineers, so you are likely to get an intelligent response to your question.

Contact information:
Live chat support: https://www.dynadot.com/chat/login_resp.html
Email support: [email protected]
North American phone support: +1.866-262-3399 (toll free) and +1.650-262-0100
Chinese phone support: 400 803 5591

This was a promoted post.​

 

[Caleb Tweed]

1) It is too hard to configure hundreds/thousands of marketplace listings in bulk. Ok, I have a number of "favorite" pricing points (lets say $888, $2999, etc). While I can bulk select all domains that should be priced @ $888 for example, and submit those for sale, there no obvious way to bulk set categories and CamelCase. The best thing one can do here is to submit domains in small batches (up to dozen or so @ the same price), ordered alphabetically, and ONLY in this case the system would accept CamelCases line for all domains in the same submission. It is far from convinient. Would it be possible to provide just two extra forms: bulk submit CamelCase for any subset of marketplace listings and bulk submit category? What I expect here is just an opportunity to copypaste and submit domain lists from my internal database either with CamelCase how it should be, or belonging to the same category...

Is this through the generic "Sell Domain" on the Manage Domains page, or on the Bulk upload on the Marketplace listing here: https://www.dynadot.com/account/marketplace/my_marketplace/? As you can choose the category this way (and by extension bulk select it via excel), and it will also upload CamelCase if that is specified in the upload.

2) Actually, domain categorization @ Dynadot serves no purpose at this time. If I am not mistaken, there is no way to search by category anywhere. The category is shown only if the visitor is reviewing domain listing he found by other means ( https://www.dynadot.com/market/user-listings/somedomain.com ), which makes no practical sense. Can Dynadot either a) implement search by categories everywhere, including homepage OR 2) eliminate categorization completely. As a matter of fact, eliminating it would be more practical, as most domains are showing default "business" category - many sellers did not bother to set it (and would not bother).

So categories are used as a filter on the User Listing search page! Photo below showing it's location.

3) The page https://www.dynadot.com/market/user-listings/somedomain.com contains a lot of irrelevant information which should be eliminated. "Registration Date" and "Years Old" are irrelevant, as perfect domain is not necessary old, but could be just dropped and registered again. Category is irrelevant, as noted above. Inbound Links cannot be correctly counted in current SEO market environment, and this unknown number tends to decrease for dropped/expired (changed content!), and, in any case, the number of such links has nothing to do with domain quality. Number of "Other TLDS" is irrelevant for purchase decision. So are "Web Archive Results" and "Similarweb Results" (why you are linking to Chinese /zh version of similarweb, btw?). So is "Sold By" field, as the domain delivery is guaranteed by Dynadot.

I have heard that Registrations date/Years old is important to some Domainers when deciding if a domain is worth purchasing, but I suppose that would vary from person to person. I'll pass it along to the team along with your thoughts on inbound links.

4) Please provide an option to edit DNS for domains using "For sale landing page". Records for www and naked domain can and should be locked from editing, but an option to edit other records is a must. For example, how can I confirm domain ownership @ dan (sedo, afternic) if I want to eliminate fraudulent listing of my domain by somebody else? I need to edit TXT record @ Dynadot DNS, but there is no way to do so.

Currently checking if we could add this, although it would have to be something very selective like just TXT records so it wouldn't interfere with directing to the Lander. For confirming ownership with Sedo/Afternic, we actually support both Fast Transfer as well as direct listing from your account so you shouldn't need to add any TXT verification!

5) For domains with "For sale landing page" DNS, please add additional DNS records indicating that there is no email service for domain in question. This is to make sure that spammers would be unable to use our forsale domains in (random) "From:" fields of their spam emails. Also, incoming spam attempts will be decreased (now they are unsuccessfully trying to deliver incoming spam to domains IP). The following records should be sufficient: { IN MX 0 . } and { IN TXT "v=spf1 -all" }. Afternic and Sedo are doing this already

I've not heard of that before, but if others currently do this then perhaps it should be possible! Let me see if we can work this into the Lander's DNS!

6) Dynadot (.com) is inaccessible from India. Please confirm that Indian visitors of forsale domains are forwarded to appropriate destination (ddot dot in), and, if not, please imlement this logic in "For sale landing page" forwarding setup.

Currently checking into this.

7) Serbian language landing pages ( https://www.dynadot.com/sr/forsale/somedomain.com?drefid=2071 ) are buggy, as there is the following extra text shown right on the pages: "Molimo vas da sve znake zvezdice, simbole, oznake HTML, navodnike i specifične formaterske sekvence ostavite netaknute u prevodu." It means - "Please leave all asterisks, symbols, HTML tags, quotation marks and specific formatting sequences intact in the translation."

Would you be able to send a screenshot of this please? I'm not able to see the extra text/I might be looking in the wrong area.

8) Please amend cloudflare rules simplifying access to forsale landing pages. It CAN be done, as cloudflare allows such a setup (up to completely unrestricting some parts of the website from their antibot technologies). If Dynadots wants to constantly ask innocent humans for captchas and human checks on the homepage / login, which is the case now, let it be so. However, as a marketplace seller, I obviously do not want to decrease sales with the current overly restrictive setup.

So we implemented Cloudflare a while back to combat DDOS attacks and bots. It looks like once this has been approved it should not appear again for the same person within a period of time. I did ask our engineers about this and it sounds like we had a less restrictive set up before, but that led to too many bot visits on pages which resulted in slowing our site down in general, so this seems to be the best option in besting that.

9) Dynadot implemented an option to generate AI descriptions to improve SEO. But why are you using meta name="robots" content="noindex" directive in forsale landing page header? You are prohibiting SE indexing this way. Please remove this directive ASAP. With or without AI descriptions, forsale pages must be available for search engines!
Edited: it appears the noindex applies to listings without optional description only, which is still illogical (IMO).

We add a no-index tag to our for sale pages that don't use the optional generated/custom description because of something called crawl budget in SEO. We used to have all for-sale pages without the no-index tag but they weren't being indexed so we had to make adjustments accordingly.

10) At this time, "For Sale landing page" setup forwards each "naked domain", www+domain, http and httpS (4 variants in total) to "https://www.dynadot.com / forsale / forsaledomain .com". It is logical, but there is a SEO problem. What is "canonical" URL for forsaledomain.com then? Google will have difficulties to decide. Resultingly, it may select it randomly or may show any subset of (www, no-www, https, http) as different entities, with different/outdated content. To solve this issue, the following may work. Lets help Google. Lets select https-without-www as "canonical" for example. So:

http+www should be 301-forwarded to https-without-www;
https+www should be 301-forwarded to https-without-www;
http-without-www should be 301-forwarded to https-without-www;
https-without-www [and only it] should be 302-forwarded to dynadot-hosted forsale page.

/maybe somewhat complicated stuff, but your SEO guys will get the idea/

Those redirects are in place, but a canonical tag is not, which could be helpful. We will investigate if that's worth adding.

11) The last but not the least. I always use USD-English version of Dynadot website, but I just checked a few localized versions, in particular for 2 other languages I am familiar with. It was a total shock. In all aspects. Just a few examples. "Aftermarket" became "After the market", while it should be as simple as "secondary market". "Resellers" were translated as "cheapjacks" (yes, literally!). What does Dynadot expect calling somebody a cheapjack? "Aftermarket search" was translated as "Search for products after the warranty period has expired". Etc, etc, etc. Please hire human translators ASAP. It may well be that all localized versions are affected... Also, unsure about Arabic translation, but it is common knowledge that Arabic is written and read from right to left. Which is why Arabic version must be also different in design and navigation! Just compare common godaddy and https://ae.godaddy.com/ar to see what I mean. Dynadot did not change the design and navigation in Arabic version unfortunately...

I agree, those errors don't look great. I think this does give us a good amount to think about regarding getting our translations correct.

Thanks taking the time to go through our site on what can be improved. For the ones I wasn't able to answer I'll look into asap on solutions.

 

[Caleb Tweed]

Just wanted to let you know that it seems to be working OK on the website but still not working in my domain list.

On my domain list, I cleared my cookies and cache and tried again. I clicked on the little arrows, they spin, just a dash comes back.
Hover over the arrow and it says "Last update on 2024/09/26" so it seems it tried to update it again today.

UPDATE: 27-SEP-2024 it seems that its working. I click on the arrow and it shows me a dash but then I refreshed the page and the value appears with today's date. I will update later...

I think it should be okay on the domain list now! Let me know if you see otherwise.

 

[Caleb Tweed]

I don't know if there's a thread for the Dynadot App but here's a problem I have been having for a while... I watch a lot of expiring domains so I receive notifications when the auctions are 24 hours, 6 hours and 1 hour from ending.

If I tap the notification I am taken to the auction page. If I try to unwatch the domain by tapping the star, I am taken to a login screen where I log in and then it loads and the login screen pops up again. This continues to happen even though I am logged into the app.

This also happens sometimes when I receive an outbid notice and try to increase my bid. I have to close the app, type the domain into the search and then click a link to bid and then I am able to increase my bid (without a login prompt appearing).

That's weird that it requires a new log in everytime, let me have our app team take a look at that.

 

[NameGroove]

Terribly disappointed with Dynadot today. Today was the day 2 new TLDs came out. .now and .deal. Dynadot's backend had issues and they tried to pass the buck to the registry (saying it was a registry, not Dynadot issue). Of course this is not true since I was able to properly get 14 out of 15 names registered with 101domain (93.33% secured).

In fact, for two names, I even ordered first at Dynadot and then only secondly at 101domain. Guess who won the domains? Yup, 101domain.

As for Dynadot, they secured exactly 50% of the domains I attempted to register with them. That's right it got me only half of the names I registered and both times where I regged the domain at both places, it lost - even though in one case it had 24 hours advance registration! What a disappointment. And then to top it off, they pass the buck claiming it's a registry issue? Such poor form. Just stand up and say you had an issue and we're sorry. Nope. Just a "not our fault" sort of response.

The registry may have had an issue in that over the weekend all registrars were showing pre-orders as still available and so registrars were still taking orders for names that had a time stamp prior to the new order at other registrars. But apparently that time stamp doesn't matter when you order via Dynadot, because as I said, I actually ordered 2 names from them, one 1 day in advance the other a few hours, but since they just sat there "processing" I ordered at 101domain, and viola, the names were in my 101domain account within minutes.

DO NOT TRUST Dynadot for new TLDs, period. You will lose out on names like I did.

@Caleb Tweed significant changes need to be made to your backend and CS training (again) if your company plans to participate in future TLD launches. I for one, will never trust your firm for new TLDs again.

 

[Optimal Names]

I think it should be okay on the domain list now! Let me know if you see otherwise.

Confirming that it is working as it used to be - all OK with it now. Thank you!!

 

[NameGroove]

Terribly disappointed with Dynadot today. Today was the day 2 new TLDs came out. .now and .deal. Dynadot's backend had issues and they tried to pass the buck to the registry (saying it was a registry, not Dynadot issue). Of course this is not true since I was able to properly get 14 out of 15 names registered with 101domain (93.33% secured).

In fact, for two names, I even ordered first at Dynadot and then only secondly at 101domain. Guess who won the domains? Yup, 101domain.

As for Dynadot, they secured exactly 50% of the domains I attempted to register with them. That's right it got me only half of the names I registered and both times where I regged the domain at both places, it lost - even though in one case it had 24 hours advance registration! What a disappointment. And then to top it off, they pass the buck claiming it's a registry issue? Such poor form. Just stand up and say you had an issue and we're sorry. Nope. Just a "not our fault" sort of response.

The registry may have had an issue in that over the weekend all registrars were showing pre-orders as still available and so registrars were still taking orders for names that had a time stamp prior to the new order at other registrars. But apparently that time stamp doesn't matter when you order via Dynadot, because as I said, I actually ordered 2 names from them, one 1 day in advance the other a few hours, but since they just sat there "processing" I ordered at 101domain, and viola, the names were in my 101domain account within minutes.

DO NOT TRUST Dynadot for new TLDs, period. You will lose out on names like I did.

@Caleb Tweed significant changes need to be made to your backend and CS training (again) if your company plans to participate in future TLD launches. I for one, will never trust your firm for new TLDs again.

And here comes the fix - Dynadot's site is down for maintenance mid-day on a Monday. First launch day of 2 new TLDs too. Way to go Dyna, way to go.

 

[Caleb Tweed]

And here comes the fix - Dynadot's site is down for maintenance mid-day on a Monday. First launch day of 2 new TLDs too. Way to go Dyna, way to go.

Show attachment 263856

It looks like we had some internal issues regarding the launch time (which is why initial registrations wouldn't go through in our system) and Premium .NOW domain registrations not being optimized for our system. The maintenance there was specifically to fix that issue. I think we have one more restart to go to iron out everything, but after that everything should be right as rain!

I do apologize for the messy launch for .NOW, we've addressed the issue and we'll make sure it doesn't happen for future launches.

 

[Caleb Tweed]

If you're looking to do some .COM transfers this month, we have the code FALL1050 for $10.50 .COM Transfers!

 

[Caleb Tweed]

Dynadot (.com) is inaccessible from India. Please confirm that Indian visitors of forsale domains are forwarded to appropriate destination (ddot dot in), and, if not, please imlement this logic in "For sale landing page" forwarding setup.

I can confirm that all For Sale pages accessed in India should be redirecting to the appropriate accessible site. If any users in India see otherwise, please contact me. Thank you!

 

[scithe]

I have heard that Registrations date/Years old is important to some Domainers when deciding if a domain is worth purchasing, but I suppose that would vary from person to person. I'll pass it along to the team along with your thoughts on inbound links.

I do find it useful to see domain ages and expiration dates when bidding. I also appreciate the links to the wayback machine. So please don't consider removing those!

 

[Optimal Names]

@Caleb Tweed I have set up some auctions today as:
No Display "Sold by"
No Display "More listings from this seller"


however, when viewing the auction at the bottom, after the description, it shows "Sold by:" and my username which is a link. Click that link and it shows ALL auctions and marketplace listings I have created.

This is behavior that I thought that I set up as to prevent from happening. Did I set something wrong or not set something else correctly?

 

[Caleb Tweed]

I have set up some auctions today as:
No Display "Sold by"
No Display "More listings from this seller"

however, when viewing the auction at the bottom, after the description, it shows "Sold by:" and my username which is a link. Click that link and it shows ALL auctions and marketplace listings I have created.

This is behavior that I thought that I set up as to prevent from happening. Did I set something wrong or not set something else correctly?

That is peculiar, as it should show up like photo attached saying "private seller" (I just set this one as a test). Could you please DM me your username and the domain you set for auction?

 

[Optimal Names]

That is peculiar, as it should show up like photo attached saying "private seller" (I just set this one as a test). Could you please DM me your username and the domain you set for auction?

Yes, will do that now... thank you!

 

[Mister Funsky]

Hi Caleb...just wondering if there is a trick to sorting names by nameserver. It will sort by ns1 for example but it stops there. It does not pick up the next letter, so they are not grouped (Dan/Afternic/Namepros/etc).

 

[Caleb Tweed]

Hi Caleb...just wondering if there is a trick to sorting names by nameserver. It will sort by ns1 for example but it stops there. It does not pick up the next letter, so they are not grouped (Dan/Afternic/Namepros/etc).

Hey! Do you mean through the filter or just when you hit the "DNS Settings" from the Manage domains area?

 

[Mister Funsky]

When I hit the top of the column that says 'DNS Settings'.

 

[Caleb Tweed]

When I hit the top of the column that says 'DNS Settings'.

Gotcha, okay let me take a look.

 

[Mister Funsky]

Hi @Caleb Tweed, any word on sorting?

Also, I've been getting this when I try to go back and look at closed offers:

"There has been an internal error in our server. An email has been sent to our technical team who will resolve the problem as soon as possible. Please try your request again later. We are sorry for the inconvenience."

 

[BrandingGo]

Hi, may I know the bidder name (his winning bid was $3.50 for Buy-s.com he didn't paid). I restarted the auction.

 

[Caleb Tweed]

Hi @Caleb Tweed, any word on sorting?

Currently working on the sorting! Just seeing what the best way to do it is.

Also, I've been getting this when I try to go back and look at closed offers:

"There has been an internal error in our server. An email has been sent to our technical team who will resolve the problem as soon as possible. Please try your request again later. We are sorry for the inconvenience."

Is it any closed offer that you run into the issue with?