LODEV.NAME

Today, October 23 at 9.00 CET the German domain registry DENIC eased some restrictions on domain registrations. The most notable change is that two letter domains have become available. These are usually quite popular, so a “land rush” was expected.

As my first name is Lode, I wanted to register the domain hack lo.de. I only read about this land rush at a couple of websites, so I anticipated some problems, namely domain registrars not knowing about the new rules. I contacted Namecheap support on thursday evening to check if they knew about this new restrictions starting today. The answer I got was quite clear, if not completely convincing: “Sure, we’ll be ready. You should be able to register directly through your account. Let me know if you’ve got any other questions.” The “should” part worried me a bit, so I prepared some backup plans.

At 9 AM I had different browser windows open, logged in to my different domain admin accounts and was ready to click “register”. I opened my accounts at OVH, Godaddy, Inforbusiness and Namecheap.

Unfortunately, all of the companies I tried with still checked according to the old DENIC restrictions.

I started searching for other .de agents, but all of them failed on me. XLhost.de, ODAC, even Register.be (I was that desperate at the time.)

At 9:05 I opened a support chat with Namecheap (as I know they have live support), to see if they could escalate. Sure enough, the operator -who seemed to be typing quite slowly- could manually register the domain for me.

The domain was still free at that time.

Three minutes later, I got: “unfortunately the domain is already registered.”

I missed it by a minute.

Thanks for nothing, domain “professionals” of the world.

Lesson learned: Next time, contact some real pros with personal service.