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Can you say a little about what it would mean for Whois to be "overwhelmed"? We're used to hearing about sites going down dealing with hundreds or thousands of

by Cushman 15y ago

Can you say a little about what it would mean for Whois to be "overwhelmed"? We're used to hearing about sites going down dealing with hundreds or thousands of requests per second, and as much as we'd all like to see GoDaddy collapse into rubble their transfers are probably more on the order of thousands a day. How plausible is it that they could actually be seeing technical difficulties?

aeden 15y ago
I agree that it seems unlikely that the whois server is having technical difficulties, rather they are probably throttling requests. Consider that spammers use whois servers as a means for harvesting email addresses and therefore they are likely limiting requests from specific IP addresses. On the other hand, if I were a relatively large registrar I'd figure that I should have a mechanism for getting whitelisted at other major registrars, so I find it hard to believe that this issue should not already be resolved, although clearly it has not.
- koenigdavidmj 15y ago
  What incentive does GoDaddy have to provide a whitelist mechanism?
  - aeden 15y ago
    None unless someone can get ICANN to consider their behavior a violation of the ICANN registry/registrar agreement.
    - thotpoizn 15y ago
      Interestingly enough, not long after a number of "blocked" customers (including myself) submitted complaints to ICANN about all this tomfoolery, GoDaddy contacted NameCheap and let them know that the blocking was all taken care of. Also, my stuck transfers suddenly unstuck. We can all speculate about whether this was malice, incompetence, or just plain old DDOS protection working as designed. Either way, it looks like the squeaky wheel got the grease.
  - biturd 15y ago
    I would imagine that because just as they need to have the ability to transfer out, they also need to transfer in. It would make sense to whitelist in the event that there is an overwhelmingly large amount of transferring in.

by Cushman 15y ago

aeden 15y ago

I agree that it seems unlikely that the whois server is having technical difficulties, rather they are probably throttling requests. Consider that spammers use whois servers as a means for harvesting email addresses and therefore they are likely limiting requests from specific IP addresses. On the other hand, if I were a relatively large registrar I'd figure that I should have a mechanism for getting whitelisted at other major registrars, so I find it hard to believe that this issue should not already be resolved, although clearly it has not.

koenigdavidmj 15y ago
What incentive does GoDaddy have to provide a whitelist mechanism?
- aeden 15y ago
  None unless someone can get ICANN to consider their behavior a violation of the ICANN registry/registrar agreement.
  - thotpoizn 15y ago
    Interestingly enough, not long after a number of "blocked" customers (including myself) submitted complaints to ICANN about all this tomfoolery, GoDaddy contacted NameCheap and let them know that the blocking was all taken care of. Also, my stuck transfers suddenly unstuck. We can all speculate about whether this was malice, incompetence, or just plain old DDOS protection working as designed. Either way, it looks like the squeaky wheel got the grease.
- biturd 15y ago
  I would imagine that because just as they need to have the ability to transfer out, they also need to transfer in. It would make sense to whitelist in the event that there is an overwhelmingly large amount of transferring in.