Trouble in RegistrarLand

It was sup­posed to be RegisterFree.com’s great­est hour. Last week, they announced that they would offer free domain reg­is­tra­tion for one hour on Thurs­day, March 23, from 9PM EST to 10PM EST.

Yes, absolutely free. How much for that domain name in the win­dow? Nada, zilch, nothing.

But for a lot of peo­ple, it seemed too good to be true. And for a lot of peo­ple, it just didn’t hap­pen. At about 9:01pm, the site started to expe­ri­ence VERY slug­gish response times. First, they claimed the NSI reg­istry stopped answer­ing.… Then their name­server crashed… Then the web server crashed. Then, hope­ful reg­is­trants around the Inter­net started talk­ing.. and talk­ing… and talking…

It’s Scal­a­bil­ity, Stupid!

In the end, the issue came down to one sim­ple over­looked issue: Yes, you guessed it.

It’s give me an S…
give me a C…
give me an A…
give me an L…
give me another A…
tired yet?
give me a B…
give me an I…
and another L…
and another I…
and a T…
and finally a Y!

What does that spell.… SCALABILITY!

While they were expect­ing under 500,000 unique vis­i­tors, they logged over 2 mil­lion attempts to enter the site and in the end under 10000 names were registered.

As a result, Reg­is­ter­Free went from being the new kid going against Net­work Solu­tions to join­ing the ranks of Victoria’s Secrets and ABC in the annals of sites that failed to scale to demand.

By 12:10am tonight, Reg­is­ter­Free issued the fol­low­ing state­ment: Ladies and Gen­tle­men:
This was truly awe­some. We never expected ANYTHING like the AMAZING response we
received to our Reg­is­ter­FREE Free Hour Pro­mo­tion. At cer­tain times over the course of the evening, the NSI reg­istry (the uni­ver­sal data­base which pro­vides domain name avail­abil­ity checks) was unable to process requests for those domain name avail­abil­ity checks. As a result, traf­fic was sig­nif­i­cantly slowed at times, and some peo­ple were unable to reg­is­ter their domain name. We hope to receive bet­ter sup­port from NSI Reg­istry dur­ing our next pro­mo­tion, which will be com­ing up very shortly. We can safely say that hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple came to RegisterFREE.com tonight, and thou­sands were able to reg­is­ter their domain name for free. At this point, we ask all those who were unable to reg­is­ter a domain name to send an email to [email protected] and let us know, so we can deal with each query per­son­ally. Con­grat­u­la­tions to all of those cus­tomers who did get through and were able to sub­mit their reg­is­tra­tion request. RegisterFREE.com STRONGLY believes that Domain Name Reg­is­tra­tion should be 100% free, and we will have this pro­mo­tion again very soon. Again, thank you for your con­tin­ued patience and sup­port as we try to make all domain names 100% free. The Reg­is­ter­FREE team.

Now I can hear many of you scoff at the fact that they couldn’t scale.

Yes, it’s true, they mis-planned but how many of us plan for such traf­fic surges? And how do you plan for some­thing like that. Do you over­build and hope that peo­ple will come? What is the fac­tor by which you have to mul­ti­ply your expec­ta­tions and get an appro­pri­ate num­ber. Last sum­mer, drugstore.com went down on its first day, del­uged by over 1 mil­lion requests. Should we use 1 mil­lion as the magic number?

Many large web sites have been designed with lit­tle atten­tion paid to scal­a­bil­ity and every time one of them fails, we all look bad. Why? Sim­ply because the Inter­net is con­sid­ered as unre­li­able when that hap­pens and THAT scares away poten­tial customers.

Don’t believe me? Try ask­ing my 82-years-old neigh­bor! When Yahoo! and Ebay were taken down, she was so scared by the neg­a­tive press that she told me she wouldn’t shop online because hack­ers would steal her credit card and over­charge it. After explain­ing to her that she was only liable for $50 max­i­mum and that inci­dents like this were rare on the Inter­net, I think I man­aged to res­cue one more cus­tomer on the Internet.

But enough neg­a­tive pub­lic­ity along the lines of what I expect to see in tomor­row morning’s news­pa­per (espe­cially con­sid­er­ing the great cov­er­age Reg­is­ter­Free man­aged to get BEFORE the event) is under­min­ing con­sumer con­fi­dence in the Inter­net and that is what I worry about.

But Wait! It Gets Better!

More trou­bling was the fact that they were blam­ing it onNSI. While I don’t par­tic­u­larly like NSI, I have to say that their whois was work­ing tonight. I spent all evening check­ing domain names in the NSI whois while I was try­ing to get into registerfree.com. It worked fine for me, actu­ally work­ing faster than it usu­ally does. I even ended up reg­is­ter­ing domain names from there. RegisterFree.com pointed out that some­one at NSI decided to take the “reg­istry pro­cess­ing sys­tems offline for an inde­ter­mi­nate amount of time” but other reg­is­trars were fine. After the pro­mo­tion ended, Reg­is­ter­Free was still the sub­ject of some dis­cus­sion regard­ing eth­i­cal issues. It may be just a tech­ni­cal­ity but other reg­is­trars like Bulk Reg­is­ter and Enom (just to take a cou­ple of names from the ICANN accred­ited list) are cheaper.

So can reg­is­ter­free be trusted? I just pro­vide the links. You make the call.