I am Todd Han, Founder of Dynadot, Ask Me Any Question

[Dynadot]

APA will begin Friday, May 22 from 4-6pm PDT, but wanted to open the thread now in case you're unable to join me during that time. If you have questions or comments you would like to make, feel free to submit them here and I will try to address them during the interactive interview session.​

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I started Dynadot in 2002, in a spare bedroom at home. I still remember getting my first order for $7.99, and jumping up and down in excitement. Back then Verisign charged $6 per .com domain, and there was no ICANN fee yet. In those early days I did everything: customer service, website programming, accounting, and marketing. As the business grew I eventually rented an office and starting building the excellent team running the company today.

I have loved computers since I was a child. Writing code and solving technical problems always came naturally to me. I studied computer science in college, and spent many hours in the dark underground computer labs at UC Berkeley. Sadly I stopped coding about 2 years ago, to focus on strategy and management. But someday I plan to return to my first love, computer programming.

Why did I start Dynadot? I was building a website for my mother for her vacation house. I was using another registrar, and thought to myself I could write a better control panel. Being young and naive, I didn’t think that much and just jumped in and applied to be a registrar. It is a competitive and difficult industry, but I have enjoyed all these years, and am proud of what we have built.

Ask me anything.

 

[Charizard]

Do you plan to increase drop catch capabilities by making more shell companies and optimizing script?

 

[DomainChat.net]

- how old are you?

- about how much to become an icann registrar that time?

 

[Alex Solomon]

Hi Mr.Todd,
Thanks for sharing the story behind Dynadot, truly inspiring.
I've used Dynadot for a while and it's great.
Thanks for the AMA!
I would love to know, how old were you when you started coding ? And have you thought of other projects besides Dynadot as a dev?

 

[Samer]

Here is a photo of me:

https://icannwiki.org/Todd_Han

Follow up question; being selfish;

says,.“In his free time enjoys playing bbball..,”

I take it you follow sports, Nba, nfl, mlb, etc?

If so, awesome! if not, still awesome.
Have a Good day : ))

Samer

 

[Vijay342]

Thanks for sharing your personal experience in creating Dynadot. I really like your Sedo MLS premium and Afternic premium network options.
Keep growing..

 

[Mytz.com]

Great website,
You beat GD in just one effort!

 

[Steven McEvoy]

What is your go to business tools?


What are you plans for Domain Reseller program?

 

[Greenthumb]

Inspiring background story Todd.

Just one question, are we getting a promo soon for .com registrations?

 

[namealbum.com]

Hmm.. beautiful story behind Dynadot, Thanks.

 

[point2021]

Hi
Can you add more payment options like Bitcoin or Webmoney?

 

[King]

This has been a great AMA glad to be a part of Dynadot

 

[abcproductions]

Thank you for the posts Mr. Han.

 

[Sinbad]

This 10% rule is same for all registrars, right ? How come another registrar is providing this service in name of Domain Tasting for way less price ?

Thank you for your questions. Yes there is often a delay in the credit to your account for marketplace sales. The reason is that we have some fraud checks that we have to perform before we can release the funds. I understand this delay can be frustrating. I can say that the delay used to be even longer. I can also say that we are actively looking for ways to shorten the delay even more.

Regarding grace deletion charges, ICANN requires us to keep our grace deletion volume under 10% of our registration volume. For example if we register 1000 .club domains in a month, we are only allowed to delete 100 of them. Otherwise we will be charged additional fees by the registry. To to keep the volume of grace deletes down, we are forced to charge a fee. Before ICANN added the grace delete quota, we offered free grace deletions.

- Todd

 

[Debasis]

Hello sir, Don't you think so there are some good brandable domains sold for low price whereas inception.com sold for $500k and not used and sitting for no reason.My question is isnt this looks bad when a good domain sold for low price..whereas one word .coms selling or sold for a high price.

 

[Bohdan]

Hi Todd, are you going to expand your dev team?

 

[uzver]

I've really come to love Dynadot as a registar over the last few years (as I started using them for .co and .io registrations)

Same for here.

I backordered and won at auction an .io domain at Dynadot in January 2019. I currently have 117 domains there (personal domains, my websites’ domains, domain investments).

 

[platey]

Many idns are sold via dynadot as i check idn and emoji website address sales everyday in namebio etc but a lot of idns translate to japanese or chinese characters etc

Where would i be able to translate!o
Japanese idns in to english

 

[kandyan]

Hi Todd,

Thanks for sharing this inspiring story.

I'm a Dynadot user and it's great.

 

[Donmarick]

That's a great story, I wish You good luck and I admire your work on such a big project.

 

[Bruce81]

Hi Todd!

I like stories of humble beginnings.

I hope you do not lose focus as Dynadot grows bigger and bigger.

I intend to increase my Dynadot domain holdings once COVID-19 (which is very good at disrupting positive cash flows) is over.

Good luck!

 

[Dynadot]

How is it that you are able to buy our expiring domains through porkbun before we have a chance to renew or pay redemption fee. We have had this experience with dynadot on multiple domain names. We have taken your offer to Ask Me Anything" Please provide an answer.

We're currently partnered with Porkbun to allow their expired domains to be auctioned within our marketplace. I'm sorry to hear you weren't able to renew those domains but we wouldn't be able to advise on the grace renewal period being offered by Porkbun unfortunately, we'd need to ask you to contact Porkbun for clarification on that.

- Daniel King

 

[Dynadot]

Hi
Can you add more payment options like Bitcoin or Webmoney?

Personally I like Dynadot and this is first time I know that Todd Han is Dynadot founder. Its really better if your company provide online support via whatsapp number.

Thank you both for the suggestions, I've had these passed on to our team for consideration.

- Daniel King

 

[Pay.My.id]

Personally I like Dynadot and this is first time I know that Todd Han is Dynadot founder. Its really better if your company provide online support via whatsapp number.

 

[coolhands]

How much are Dynadot making per Month or Yearly?

 

[Kai W.]

Thank you for these interesting questions. Employees 1 and 2 were both engineers. Employee 3 was customer service.

Our customer service team is 15 people and growing fast.

Yes, everyone in the company used to handle customer support tickets. Especially on weekends or evenings the rest of the company would handle customer support, so the support reps could get time off. However about 4 years ago we reached a critical mass of customer support reps, and so they could cover most of the weekend and evening work. At that time the rest of the company stopped doing front line customer support. However more difficult technical problems are still escalated to the engineers. And more difficult disputes are escalated to our in-house counsel.

I would say that our engineers and customer support work pretty closely together, to this day. Customer service is pretty proactive at getting engineers involved if there is a problem. If there is a bug in our system we want it fixed by the engineers as soon as possible, instead of covering it up or ignoring it. This takes more time on the front end, but in the long run it makes our site more reliable and lowers support costs.

- Todd

But I think your email customer service is not professional, the response is not timely enough, and there is no perfect solution to the problem of account processing. As I have experienced “Account security authentication solution”