SnapNames.com “Terminates Its Relationship” With At Least 18 Registrars

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I have, over the last couple of days, received over 18 e-mails from Snapnames.com, each announcing that they are terminating their relationship with one of their partner registrars.

As I write this post, notices are still coming in, so the number of terminated registrars, might grow about

So far, the notices include the following registrars:

Answerable.com

Names Real

Names Bond

Naming Associate

Primal Store

Specific Name

Retail Studio

The Names Registration, Inc.

Name Churner

Hosting Fort

Global Names Online

Get Real Names

General Names

Fortune Internet

Bottle Domains

BatDomains

Urban Volcano

Venus Domains

Of course I have questions:

Why are all these relationships being terminated?

Is SnapNames.com the one terminating the relationships, or are the registrars pulling out of their deal with Snapnames.com?

With these 15 registrars gone from SnapNames.com will this hamper SnapNames.com ability to get domains during the drop?

Are this registrars going to join NameJet.com?

Most of these registrars I have not heard much about, but Answerable was a biggie and saw them frequently on domains I got from SnapNames.com.

Here is a copy of the e-mail that went out, only the names of the registrar changes, this one is for Answerable:

“””SnapNames will be terminating its relationship with Answerable. While that will have no direct impact on your name(s) registered with Answerable we nonetheless recommend that you transfer your domain name(s) to another registrar well before the name is set to expire. We will assist you in any way that we can, but please be aware that we have no ability to control or influence the operation of Answerable.

If you have difficulty locating the domain names registered with Answerable you may download your registration history from your SnapNames account and search for Answerable.””””

About Michael Berkens

Michael Berkens, Esq. is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TheDomains.com. Michael is also the co-founder of Worldwide Media Inc. which sold around 70K domain to Godaddy.com in December 2015 and now owns around 8K domain names . Michael was also one of the 5 Judges selected for the the Verisign 30th Anniversary .Com contest.

Comments

  3. Rob Sequin says

    I guess I’m not as big of a drop catcher as you. I only got four 🙂

    This is interesting.

    These emails are being blasted out with no reply text, no links to the registrar and no explanation.

    So, either the marketing guys are not involved or they have nothing positive to say.

    Either way, I would hope that Snapnames will be explaining this to their customers or we are going to have to start guessing about what all this means.

    I don’t see how this can be anything positive at this point.

  4. Kellie says

    I only got the one for BatDomains, despite having caught a bunch of names at a variety of these registrars. Hrm.

  5. Viram Lodhia says

    Hi all.

    Just wanted to clarify a few things here regarding the above article:

    1. The name Answerable.com was included by SnapNames in their email by way of error. It should actually have been Internet Service Registrar, Inc. We have already sent an email to SnapNames requesting a correction.

    2. Customers using Answerable.com to manage their domain names will be able to manage their domains as they always do. Rest assured any domains registered through Answerable’s batchpool will not be affected in any way whatsoever.

    For any further queries or clarifications on this please feel free to contact me at viram.l [at] directi.com.

  6. Jamie says

    No more tasting = Less fire power needed for the drop. That is my guess on the reason for dropping several registrars.

  9. phil says

    Aren’t these just registrars that snapnames leased out to pickup names from the drop and get batch pool connections? I didn’t think they were “real” registrars.