Daily Domainer

NetNames, the UK’s leading domain name management specialist, has been appointed to help protect and manage Unilever’s 6,300+ domain names. Unilever, the British-Dutch packaged goods conglomerate, is consolidating its domains, which were previously spread over different registrars.

Netnames' Platinum Service provides useful features such as guaranteed domain renewal, dedicated account management, online portfolio manager software, simple and flexible invoicing, and support with registering and renewing domain names anywhere in the world.

The Daily Domainer was a bit skeptical at first, but it does appear that several major companies such as British Airways, Centrica and William Hill prefer to outsource the above mentioned tasks rather than handling them in-house.

NetNames charges £35 (almost $70) per com/net/org/info/biz domain per year. On their pricing page (click on "Pricing") they state, "Many domain name companies charge extra for the services that NetNames provides as standard within our registration service." Yet right below that sentence we can see their fees for services such as subdomains (£29 one-off fee), transfer-out (£19.00), registrant owner changes (£49 to £299), and change of contacts and/or change of nameservers (£15 to £99). As most other registrars offer these usually automated services free of charge, it is likely that Netnames performs these tasks manually, thereby providing additional security to domain owners.

NetNames' services are similar to those of MarkMonitor, a US company that manages Google's domain registrations. MarkMonitor recently dropped the ball (see here and here) when they failed to reject an unauthorized transfer request for google.de, which led to the domain being briefly unaccessible during the early morning hours of Jan 23, 2007 (German time).