Considering the fact I tried to start up my own "one-stop" domain services shop February - 13 months ago, I got to know these companies very well back then. But I haven't kept up with the news lately after I failed to find a biz partner.
I did contact the managment at both Fauxbox.com (which had a superior technological solution but quite hapless about marketing and understanding of the market potential) and NameSecure.com.
Fauxbox.com, a subsidiary of Pobox.com (of which I'm a former customer) has, arguably, one of the most dim-witted management teams of any dotcom out there. I wrote them a long message informing of ways they can improve their service (marketing, moving downwards the price point of their prohibitively and ridiculously high cost, key partnerships) and pointed out a serious error in their FAQ explaning their URL redirection service (which they quickly corrected, to their credit).
They informed me that fauxbox.com was only an extension developed to serve the desires of their existing pobox.com base and that they had no desire to pursue the business aggressively in itself. Obviously, they think that charging users an exorbitant fees for email forwarding is a valid core business model, which is a pipe dream. Thus, it appears that pobox.com and fauxbox.com have lost their former market leadership position, as I predicted.
Namesecure has better management. I can't remember the details, but the CEO seemed sharp. Early on, she set up partnerships with the likes of Netopia and a bunch of other key players and had a key understanding of marketing. The Namesecure affiliate program, by several orders of magnitude, was more viral and effective in nature. Offering an amazingly high $7.50 per reference had a ton of people posting to USENET newsgroups recommending the service, i can remember...
Other competitors include domaindirect.com, which had the benefit of being part of the Tucows Network. Also, yournamefree.com, started by the guy who formerly ran domainsdirect.com (note the 's' in the name). But it seemed to be a garage operation which had a bizarre pricing structure that did not effectively match prices with costs.
There was an upfront fee for lifetime service, I guess he was in a hurry to get cash to the detriment of future cash flows and costs.
Anyway, last summer, I was in the process of writing a detailed white paper for Fatbrain.com's eMatter service about the technological and marketing differences between these various services. But I never finished 'cuz of my new career. Oh well. In summary, Fauxbox had a superior service but not affordable by anyone at all and hopelessly delusional management that would drive the service into the ground as far as marketing went. Namesecure.com had good management and was on the rise. domaindirect was behind namesecure and the gap may have been increasing but it still had good exposure as part of tucows. yournamefree.com had its owner aggressively marketing on USENET but seemed to be a weak operation that didn't look promising as a standalone entity.
At the time, I remember Register.com's forwarding service, on a cost/benefit basis, was quite inferior to namesecure although i'm not sure how things are nowadays.
yes indeed, the sucess of namesecure, register.com is not going to come at the expense of netsol. rather than being a zero-sum game, these upstarts are expanding the market and must essentially pay a large commission to netsol anytime they do so.
On a cost/benefit basis, at the time, there were different technological approaches to the forwarding solution, so it's not a clear-cut apples-to-apples comparison. For example, 'dumb' forwarding failed to freeze the domain name. So the next step in the evolution of dns forwarding addressed that (which went under the misnomer "URL-gripping" instead of domain-gripping by the company that pioneered it), and could be found as a free service. Although it was difficult for search engines to index these pages, which defeated a main purpose of having a website in the first place. Lastly, fauxbox.com (if I remember correctly, but I'd need to refer to my notes from a year ago) went a step farther with a caching/mirror solution that bypassed some of the shortcomings of the other two models.
- Netconductor.com
>>Marc Schiler wrote:
I looked at the RCOM IPO, but what gave me pause was the fact that NameSecure is much cheaper. RCOM charges $50 per year to forward from the registered domain name to another url. NameSecure does it for free. Eventually this will put pressure on RCOM, won't it? Or, perhaps NameSecure is not well known enough.
There will be a pricing squeeze, especially since both of them have to pay $6/year to NetSolutions for every domain registered.
That's why I am hesitant at the current prices. Of course I sold most of my CSCO and Nokia some time ago because they couldn't go much higher. Of course, they both did.
Regards,
Marc |
