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Comment by brucehart | Hacker News Reader

I've used name.com for many years and have always been satisfied with their service. The advertising the author is complaining about only shows up if you do not configure the DNS records or name servers after buying the domain. Usually I spend 30 seconds setting this up as soon as I buy the domain, so the advertising doesn't even cross my mind.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought this practice was pretty standard across the industry. The "unscrupulous" registrar tactics that I'm more concerned about are registrars that take domains when they sense demand (such as from searching or whois lookups) and hold it from you until you pay a premium. I've never had this issue with name.com and have found it very easy to transfer domains with them as well.

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I configured the DNS immediately. However, one thing I'm not willing to do is set up a wildcard A record for my hosted zone when the request should be returning an nxdomain instead. There is no way in name.com's setting to enable that.

On an ethical level this is closer to typo-squatting, something that there are rules against.

> One thing I'm not willing to do is set up a wildcard A record

Why not? I'm being earnest here, I'm a name.com customer and I do have such a wildcard record. Are you building a network service that relies on nonexistent subdomains being resolved at the DNS level (rather than a 404 page or a redirect to a subdomain that does exist)? Or is it more of a philosophical thing?

1. I don't want to provide multiple entry points. As an intentionally vulgar example, http://f***you.example.com would resolve if using a wildcard address. That is unacceptable.

2. I'm in the process of setting up a self-assembling system that will need to be environment aware (public, staging, dev). If I redirect everything to a single A record I actually have to perform logic on my end. A failed request will instead mean to simply move to the next in the list. (Or that is how I am scheming for it to work anyway, not being built yet I don't know how it will turn out.)

For most people the solution is very simple. Use a rewrite rule in your web server config. In nginx:

  if ($host !~  "^(example.com|beta.example.com|valid.example)$") {
      rewrite  ^/(.*)$  http://example.com/$1  permanent;
  }

http://www.example.com/about

http://fuckshit.example.com/about

becomes

http://example.com/about

This is good practice in any case, so that you're always serving up the canonical URL.

I would much rather http://fuckshit.example.com/ end up at a browser error page instead of being redirected to my site. This prevents the clever person who decides to link to me with http://fuckshit.example.com/ as the URL. (And I use mod_rewrite for naked domain to www redirect, so I'm familiar with this.)

Not that it addresses your complaint, but a wildcard CNAME will also work.

Actually, this isn't just if you don't setup DNS records for your domain name. If you configure some subdomains with name.com, then all other subdomains for that domain go to a parked page.

For example, my wife's website is jesleephotos.com. The subdomains store and www (along with some others that I don't wish to advertise :) go to the correct destination. The subdomain stuff, x, random, mail, etc all go to parked domain.

I might end up adding an A record for *.jesleephotos.com as a catchall and point it to some IP address I can get that will forward everything to www.

So, don't use name.com's name servers if you don't like what they are offering?

Yes, that's the logical conclusion. But purchasing a domain with the thought that dns hosting is included in the purchase price only to find out the the service doesn't work as it should, is valid a reason to be upset IMHO.

I do not run my own mail servers anymore, but I do run my own DNS servers. Being able to have full control over all the records my system responds with is very nice. Made setting up things like Jabber servers drastically easier, etc.

Setup the store/www server to accept any subdomain and then put your catchall A record in. Done.

Downvotes? For a suggestion that will save this person time and money since they seem to think they need more resources to redirect requests which is inferior and will length time from request to content anyway?

The voting on HN is just crap lately. This is third time in as many days that I've been downvoted for accurate technical information. I'm frankly growing weary of it.

I know that GoDaddy and Network Solutions both do the same thing or at least have in the past. I've never really given it much thought because I didn't figure the 20 or so ad impressions that a brand new domain was going to provide wasn't really worth much.

I'm far more bothered by the huge variance in pricing from one registrar to another for the same domain.

The nonstandard part seems to be that the owner of the site ends up being responsible for any of the ads that show up on the parked page. So if I were to register kidsexchange.com and forgot about I would be liable for any ads being shown there containing child pornography.

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