Domain name registrar Network Solutions has faced two web site outages in the past week.
The first outage, about a week ago, was the result of a denial of service attack. The second outage, which occurred Tuesday morning, was the result of an internet outage at Savvis.
Domain names registered at various registrars function fine when the main registrar’s web site goes down, but users are unable to make changes to their domains (e.g. nameservers, Whois). You can imagine the frustration if you tried to go to your main registrar’s web site for two hours without success.
It is unclear if Network Solutions’ webhosting customers were affected by this outage.
Network Solutions was the first commercial domain name registrar. In the late 90s the company charged $70 to register .com domain names for two years. The company’s market share was eroded when Network Solutions’ monopoly ended. Upstarts like Dotster and GoDaddy entered the market with registration prices a fraction of Network Solutions’. GoDaddy is now the world’s largest registrar in terms of domains under management and registrations.
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