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Show HN: Park your domain name with just 2 DNS records
- dewey 9y agoIs there also a way to do it without the price? Putting a price on it directly will either cause people to not bother if it's too high for some side project or make it too cheap if some huge corp wants to buy it.
- tompec 9y agoYes, just do not specify the price, and it won't appear.
- corobo 9y agoOther than the "secondes" my only real feedback is the price - Charge more! I think you may be underestimating a little just how many domains people have if they're in the business of selling them!
- tompec 9y agoOh yeah... Sometimes I mix up my french/english :P About the price, you're right, but I'll probably make different plans. Thanks for the feedback!
- corobo 9y agoYeah my only real experience selling domains are on sites like flippa who take either/both an upfront listing fee or a percentage of the sale price. If you're not doing the latter you can almost definitely charge more for unlimited domains :) Really like the idea for the site, nice work
- sowbug 9y agoAlso "set up" is the verb form, and "setup" is the noun form. Similar: Log in with your password, and login will be complete. The signout process causes the user to sign out. I will pick up some rocks with my pickup truck because someone asked for a rock pickup.
- tomascot 9y agoGreat idea. What do you use to read the records?
- fireworks10 9y agoCool project. We do something very similar with an internally made lander for our domain portfolio, and it works well. Lots of serious buyers contact via e-mail listed on whois too. One thing very useful is to have analytics, perhaps you could add a feature for users to input a Google Analytics tag (UA-000000). Side note: for anyone who actually wants to sell/buy a domain in a private transaction, I highly recommend Escrow.com as an escrow service.
- tompec 9y agoHi, thanks! I planned to add more options to customize the landing page, including adding the GA tag ;) Thanks for the tip!
- fireworks10 9y agoAlso if someone enters a path other than the index nothing catches the 404. At the least you should have a redirect. :) http://backdoor.fr/123 http://backdoor.fr/123
- ForFreedom 9y agoInteresting.. Why would someone want to park domains when web hosting is available for $3.xx/mo
- corobo 9y agoPeople parking domains often have lots of domains. This sort of thing also gives you a prebuilt "contact me" sort of thing which can be a minor pain. Take the pain out of something and you can sell it.
- attacomsian 9y agoLook nice. Why not allow users to list their domains and setup prices in dashboard instead of TXT record? Efty is already doing it.
- attacomsian 9y agoI shared domdb with NamePros community(the biggest community of domainers): https://www.namepros.com/threads/domdb-park-your-domain-in-less-than-15-seconds.1037674/ https://www.namepros.com/threads/domdb-park-your-domain-in-l... You may get good feedback from the people who are in domaining business.
- tompec 9y agoThanks, appreciated!
- tompec 9y agoYou can already set the price in the dashboard. But the idea was to be able to manage your domain from your registrar without having to login on domdb.
- r1ch 9y agoYou may want to look into adding a CAPTCHA or some other kind of spam prevention system to the contact form. Spambots these days will fill in any contact forms with all kinds of spam. If you're remailing those contact form responses through your server to the domain owner, these spambots will damage your IP reputation and legit inquiries might start getting blocked.
- tompec 9y agoI just did, thanks!
- Arkanosis 9y agoSorry for being that guy, but seeing all the enthusiastic responses on HN, I'm wondering… Am I, in 2017, the only one left thinking that domain parking is a harmful activity? Like… the DNS equivalent of patent trolling…
- tyingq 9y agoI don't think all domain parking is harmful. Buying a known brand and extorting, sure. But, I registered several <word>media.com names and sold them for $200 to $2k each. I just saw the trend of that style of domain. Didn't feel bad about it. It seems similar to buying land and sitting on it.
- Arkanosis 9y agoI struggle to find the added value in making a domain name more expensive that it would have been through a regular registrar. Do you provide additional services, such as curated listings of domain names you thought sounded good and were still available? If I learn you're selling a domain just because it's not available for registration anymore, you are not adding value to my business, only increasing its costs.
- tyingq 9y agoAhh. Yes, I just don't consider that "harmful". It is clearly opportunistic. But, chances are that if I didn't buy it, someone else that planned on using it would have, and they wouldn't sell. The value add is that it's available to you at all, because I spotted the trend early.
- Arkanosis 9y agoThank you for having taken the time to explain :)
- dvlsg 9y agoThe value you would add by making it available to me is value you would also add directly to the other parties intending to purchase and use it. So really, we're in the same boat as before as far as availability is concerned, except now I'm buying from you for a higher price.
- dola 9y agoCool idea. I hope you somehow confirm the listing on the dashboard, otherwise someone can just list some domains under your username to cost you money ;)
- floatingatoll 9y agoIt's important to remember that "just" DNS records are anything but "just" safe. Keep in mind that when you do this, you grant a third-party organization the ability to 'vouch' to anyone that they 'own' your domain or a URL at it, as long as the 'vouch' test supports http:// http:// or https:// https:// URLs. This is the case for all web-hosting everywhere on the Internet. I host all of my domains through third-party providers, knowing and accepting the above-described risk. I consider it so low likelihood and of only medium impact if something ever occurs. The value is immense, the time spent is small, and the tradeoff worth it. Imagine if someone phoned up your IT department and asked them to fix the MX record due to a mail server outage. Would you notice if your Received headers added a hop you weren't familiar with before? How long would they be able to record your company's email before someone noticed? So I encourage taking DNS with absolute seriousness, and careful consideration of changes, and never simply assigning "just" 2 records to anyone, ever. Given 2 records, someone can do a lot more damage than any website hack ever could. ps. "IN TYPE15" or thereabouts is another way to state "IN MX", to further convey why it can be very dangerous to follow instructions. Most admins would pause at an MX change, but most wouldn't think twice about a custom "TYPE15" record 'not supported by BIND yet', given sufficient verbiage.
- Illniyar 9y agoKeep in mind that this is an A record (and a TXT one) not an MX record, the only thing they can do with it is change the content of the site (which is what you want them to do). Tough I've known extremely incompetent IT support, I think even they would be suspicious of someone proving his identity by making a "this is me" html page.
- drefanzor 9y agoHi, nice and simple site. Thanks! Maybe in the future can you give analytics as to who is visiting the site? That way we can get an idea of the demographics of who is going to which domain? (paid feature maybe)
- tompec 9y agoGreat idea. Would you prefer to have basic analytics in the dashboard, or being able to add Google Analytics and have better analytics from GA dashboard?
- ThePhysicist 9y agoI'm curious, why do you ask your users to create an A entry for this? I think a CNAME/ALIAS entry to the domain of the service would be a safer choice in case you should be forced to change your IP address (e.g. if you change your hosting provider), which would currently force all your users to update their A entries. Also, using a CNAME domain would allow you to hide your IP address behind a CDN service like Cloudflare, which can be handy sometimes (e.g. for DDoS protection).
- ShakataGaNai 9y agoDNS spec doesn't support CNAME on the Apex record (ex your domain sans www). Alias isn't commonly supported by a lot of services yet either.
- majewsky 9y agoI saw this as well when using a self-owned domain with Github Pages. Any idea why the spec forbids it?
- rdslw 9y agohttp://bfy.tw/Dabs http://bfy.tw/Dabs
- bluejekyll 9y agoIt's mostly due to ambiguity. Think of it like a directory, you can't have a file with the same name as a directory in a path, because operations on that name and path become ambiguous. Zone SOAs are very much like directories on a filesystem.
- ThePhysicist 9y agoI think with Cloudflare it's possible, at least I'm pretty sure I did it with sites before using the "@" record (I could be wrong of course).
- ShakataGaNai 9y ago
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- compuguy 9y agoI like it, but I wish there was an option to just park it without saying it is for sale.
- raulk 9y agoCareful. Pointing your A record to a third party allows that party to use HPKP [1] with a long expiry period and never give you the key, potentially nuking the domain (for anyone who has visited it before you sell it). [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Public_Key_Pinning https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Public_Key_Pinning
- DaiPlusPlus 9y agoThis is a pretty serious attack - is there really no way to mitigate it? An arbitrary HTTP header is pretty low on the totem-pole of trust, so why don't they periodically check DNS records for corroboration?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- kf5jak 9y agoMaybe I just couldn't find it, but it would be nice to see a template or example of what the parked page would look like.
- i4i 9y agohttps://www.domdb.com/img/landing.jpg https://www.domdb.com/img/landing.jpg
- homero 9y agoI spent weeks searching for free dns parking. Ended up just removing the name servers. I'll try this!
- futhey 9y agoNice! Curious as to the name though. Why DomDB?
- tompec 9y agoI had the domain since a while and was not using it. So instead of searching hours for a name, I just used what I had :D
- kyledrake 9y agoRaise the price. $5/mo minimum.
- echan00 9y agoHas anyone tried this service? I haven't had much luck setting this up... and I'm fairly certain I have the DNS setup accordingly.
- tompec 9y agoHi, please use the contact form on the website for support.
- sigi45 9y agoDon't like it. There are not enough good reasons to 'park' a domain.
- amingilani 9y agoThank you so much. I acquired blackmail.io as part of a, now defunct, project and had been meaning to put it up for sale. This was the perfect lazy solution for me :) Tips for pricing your domain: 1. Think of how attached you are to the domain 2. Think of how much you think you'd be willing to pay for the domain in the open market 3. Think of how much the cleveriness of the domain name is Add all these values together, and multiply it by 2.
- inmean 9y agoThis services could transform to One Page hosting services.