domain name registrar A domain name registrar is a company that manages the reservation of Internet domain names. A domain name registrar must be accredited by a generic top-level domain (gTLD) registry or a country code top-level domain (ccTLD) registry. A registrar ...

History

The company was founded in 1994 as Forman Interactive Corp by brothers Peter and Richard Forman and their brother-in-law, Dan B. Levine as a provider of website creation software. In 1999, the company officially changed its name to Register.com. On April 21, 1999,

ICANN The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN ) is an American multistakeholder group and nonprofit organization responsible for coordinating the maintenance and procedures of several databases related to the namespaces ...

announced Register.com was one of the first five testbed registrars for the competitive Shared Registry System. On June 7, the company began operations under this name as a paid registrar in the .com, .net and .org domains and soon became the first of the five testbed registrars to come online. It was initially selling 3,000 to 4,000 domain names per day. In March 2000, at the peak of the

dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compo ...

, the company became a

public company A public company is a company whose ownership is organized via shares of stock which are intended to be freely traded on a stock exchange or in over-the-counter markets. A public (publicly traded) company can be listed on a stock exchange (l ...

via an

initial public offering An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investment ...

. The stock price peaked at $116 per share; 1 year later the stock traded at $5 per share. In September 2000, the company acquired Afternic.com for $48.6 million in cash and stock. In 2003, Richard D. Forman resigned from his positions as president and chief executive officer. In November 2005, Register.com was acquired by Vector Capital for $200 million. In 2005, it became the first online services company to receive the

J.D. Power J.D. Power is an American consumer research, data, and analytics firm based in Troy, Michigan. The company was founded in 1968 by James David Power III. It conducts surveys of customer satisfaction, product quality, and buyer behavior for the aut ...

Call Center Certification. Register.com received this recognition again in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. Vector Capital brought in David Moore, a principal at the private equity firm Sonostar, as an interim CEO. In November 2006, Larry Kutscher joined Register.com as chief executive officer. Kutscher came to Register.com from Dun & Bradstreet where he served as Senior Vice President and general manager of the Small Business Group. in June 2010,

Web.com Web.com Group Inc. was an American company headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida that provides domain name registration and web development services. Established in 1999 by Darin Brannan, the company was known as Website Pros Inc. until early ...

acquired the company for $135 million.

Controversies And Consumer Issues

On April 1, 2009, Register.com suffered a major

DDoS In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host A ...

attack, downing thousands of web sites. Customers were not able to access the website or receive email for 3 days. In January 2010, the Chinese search engine

Baidu Baidu, Inc. ( ; , meaning "hundred times") is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products and artificial intelligence (AI), headquartered in Beijing's Haidian District. It is one of the la ...

sued Register.com for gross negligence after an employee allegedly allowed a third party access to Baidu's account despite them failing to pass basic security verification, allowing for a

Domain hijacking Domain hijacking or domain theft is the act of changing the registration of a domain name without the permission of its original registrant, or by abuse of privileges on domain hosting and registrar software systems. This can be devastating to ...

of the Baidu website by the

Iranian Cyber Army The Iranian Cyber Army is an Iranian computer hacker group. It is thought to be connected to Iranian government, although it is not officially recognized as an entity by the government. It has pledged loyalty to Supreme Leader of Iran. According t ...

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Register.Com 2000 initial public offerings 2010 mergers and acquisitions Domain name registrars Dot-com bubble Internet properties established in 1994 Organizations based in Jacksonville, Florida Web.com Web hosting

History

Controversies And Consumer Issues

See also

References

External links