Show HN: Fast and efficient domain checking tool | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Fast and efficient domain checking tool

instantname.me

65 pointsvolodymyr_f44 comments

Neat, but I like http://domai.nr/ better because it shows interesting TLDs that would make my domain be one word. For instance, it suggests tim.do/rr for my username.

Good, feature request received. :)

domainsbot has a great API for this - it's what all the big registrars use

Very nice! Much like instantdomainsearch, but with much broader TLD coverage.

Your pricing for Gandi seems incorrect; for instance, Gandi charges $15.50/year for .com domains, not $18.54.

Sad that this still points people at GoDaddy as the cheapest option; you get what you pay for, and GoDaddy has numerous well-known problems (in their policies on how they (don't) support you if they get a complaint, and in their many distasteful actions as a company).

You might also consider doing the obvious domain hack searches, at least for exact matches: if the term the user typed in ends with a valid TLD, drop that suffix and search for that term with that TLD. For instance, for the term "exampleio", since it ends in "io", show the result for "example.io" and label it "domain hack" on the left (where you show the labels for "exact match", "gTLD", and "ccTLD").

Thank you for your feedback and the great idea about the domain hacks implementation. :)

The prices are shown with the included taxes and ICANN fees, which all registrars calculate a bit differently. I tried to make them as much comparable as possible. The total price for .com domain at Gandi.net is indeed 18.54 (https://www.gandi.net/domain/price/detail/com/)

Which other registrars would you like to be included?

That price only applies if you live in the EU and have to pay VAT. You don't have to pay that price anywhere else in the world. And Gandi covers all the relevant fees; the price they quote is what you actually pay them.

You are right, I'll take that into account.

Maybe I was confused because the domain for this project was registered through Gandi.net and I had to pay that tax as I currently live in the EU. :)

"Last week I came back to this idea and realized that there are good alternatives available, it should not be treated a reason to stop."

- Awesome, I'm glad you decided to go ahead with this. This is a crowded space but you've been able to make a useful tool with features other sites don't have. Congrats!

Wow! Great work. If I had a request, it would be to support more exotic TLDs and other registrars--but it's amazingly useful as-is. The price comparison is killer; I had no idea I could register a .TV domain for 10 bucks. I'll definitely be using this.

Is your VPS doing the DNS lookup, or is that client side? If it's done on your server, I would suggest that the site preview feature could be made click-activation rather than automatic. It's already pretty slow to load, and I would be just as happy with a link to open an unavailable domain in a new window. Basically, if the preview slows down the domain availability lookup, I think it should be pushed to a lower priority.

Overall, very slick! Congrats on a successful side-project.

Thank your for the detailed feedback!

You can get the availability for most of the known TLD if you specify the fully qualified domain name in the input. I am going to tune the list of the shown TLDs in order to have the most popular/interesting ones there.

Which registrars would you like to be added?

Love the tool. Since the "Propose it" link doesn't seem to work for me, here's a feature request: can you put the query in the hash fragment so that I can paste this into an email or chat?

Thanks for the great feature request! Will work on that.

Hi Everyone,

This is a domain availability checking tool with a simple clean design, a website preview for taken domains and a price comparison for the available ones.

Some details about the used technologies are in my blog post at http://floreskul.name/post/introducing-instantname-me. I would appreciate any feedback. :)

Thanks

I didn't expect this to work with so many TLDs, very cool! I haven't really found anything like this before. I wish I had more constructive criticism, the layout is clean and it just works so great. Maybe include a more customized favicon? I'll definitely keep it bookmarked.

Thanks for the feedback. Yes, I forgot about the favicon, will add that. I am glad you liked it.

How can I specify custom ccTLDs to check?

You can just type the domain name with ccTLD included, e.g. "google.us". It will show in the top row.

Amazing work, but why is GoDaddy always the top result? It's clearly not the collation, since Gandhi inevitably is at the bottom.

The domains are shown in a random (but fixed) order at the moment, but I think it's better to sort them by price. Do you have any better criteria on your mind?

I particularly like the idea that it will preview the website on hover. I will probably like it even more once it actually works!

Cool (and really fast) tool! I'd love to talk to you on behalf of the .CO TLD team.. can you drop me an email at tom+hn@go.co?

Done

Excellent! that's just replaced http://instantdomainsearch.com/ for me (even thought that seems a tad faster) thanks to the inclusion of .co.uk.

Only slight annoyance is that I have to scroll down to see all the TLDs, that slows down the process a little.

It took me a few moments to realize the reason this service wasn't working at all was because you use port 3000 to load the domain registration information. Many firewalls, both in a corporate environment and at home, tend to block things like this.

Perhaps you could reconsider this decision and use port 80.

This is nice. I used it to discover that instantna.me is still available. You should pick it up! :-)

Wow, great advice.

This is great. Came back explicitly to search and upvote as this was perfect for that initial quick sanity check of url availability.

Currently US centric - would be nice to be able to select to see localised (UK here) registrars and currency.

Nice work, I would suggest expanding the range of ccTLDs though - as there are so many, maybe put the available ones at the top of the ccTLD list to prevent too much scrolling. I like the quick links to registrars at the side, very handy.

Very handy! Here's another feature suggestion: include the renewal rate on your price comparison. For example Namecheap does .co registration for ~$13 for the first year, but after renewal it's ~$22 (just did this yesterday).

Looks good. 2 things I would add: - automatically exit the "getting website preview" on taking the mouse off the div. - an X or some way to close the website preview thing (once website preview loaded). Good luck!

It appears to be buggy. It told me Internet.io, Business.mobi, Collect.fm and others were available (they're not). It was making me very excited until I learned it was mistaken quite regularly. :(

I didn't want to make anyone upset with this tool.

The current version of the service is based on the DNS lookup, which is not always accurate. The errors may happen when a domain does not have a name server record specified or it is in the a redemption period.

The current version is an experiment that checks if such a tool can be useful for people. All the received feedback will be used to improve it. Using more reliable approach of domain availability checking for sure has the highest priority.

I like it, but I gotta say - a decent logo would take this a long way forward. Can I volunteer to make something for free that's at least better than what you have now?

I would really appreciate that. You can email me at volodymyr.floreskul+hn@gmail.com.

The interface is easy and simple to use. I was trying to search for a .in domain and it is still looking for it after about a minute of hitting submit.

http://instantna.me/ would be a fantastic domain name for this website. And it's not taken!

There seems to be some domain names that your tool indicates to be available, but they can't actually be registered (eg. ao.io).

Loving it! I've sent you a few feature requests through your form, I hope it helps you a bit :)

Very easy, fast and useful. Thanks. Bookmarked.

Minor misspelling on the contact link.

What about domains that are registered but on sale?

For now this tool does not help to find such domains, but it sounds like a really nice feature to implement, thanks.

how do you deal with lookup quotas (if there are any)?

Currently the domain check is done via simple DNS lookups. It's not the most reliable way, but it's very fast. Although there is a small probability of checking result errors, for the MVP I decided to stop with this solution.

I plan to apply for TLD Zone Access programs (like http://www.verisigninc.com/en_US/products-and-services/domai...) if this project gets a positive feedback. That would help to keep things both fast and reliable.

Probably using DNS and not whois. DNS is very fast and has no restrictions but can be inaccurate.

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