Registrars parking your sub-domain for you
You always need to take a close look at your supplier’s terms and service. Especially if you are using their DNS, since some registrars will reserve the right to “park” the subdomains of your domains if you use their DNS.
From Dotster’s terms of service:
DNS Wildcard. In the event you utilize Dotster, Inc.s DNS management services and fail to configure a wildcard DNS for your domain, Dotster, Inc. may insert wildcard DNS records to resolve subdomains of your domain that would not otherwise resolve. Dotster, Inc. may point those subdomains to a web page that may contain advertisements and other materials selected by Dotster, Inc. in Dotster, Inc.s sole discretion. This may include, but is not limited to, third-party website, third-party product and service offerings, and/or Internet search engines.
So don’t be surprised when someone misstypes “ww.yourdomain.com” and sees advertising.
I’ve heard stories about GoDaddy doing similar things when you use their DNS, can anyone confirm? As far as I know they don’t even allow users to set a wildcard themselves. Plus, many registrars will default-park your newly registered domain of you are not using your own nameservers.
Oh and yes, then there’s your friendly hosting provider. Some of them are even so friendly that they will default to displaying ads on your error pages.
If you know of any other nice places that try to make money of your site/domain, please let us know in the comments.
[Update]: Just to add to this. Imagine you advertise your site via PPC. Someone types in ww.yourdomain.com and ends up on the registrar monetization page. Your ad is displayed, they click on it. The registrar makes money off you in order to get a visitor that is trying to get to your site.
[via NamePros]
I can attest to that.
I got a domain on wwdomains.com
I had my domain pointing to a parking company using wwdomains default servers.
One day I did a search on search engines; guess what I found?
Since it was a expired domain I cought, it had minor traffic from previous website and the previous website had a couple of pages on subdomains; happens that those subdomains were indexed by the search engines and received more traffic than the domain itself.
I clicked on the link and Surprise! The registrar was monetizing a parked page all on their own.
Yes they are doing it. Specially on previously built websites.
Question.- Which parking companies let you park subdomains?
Cambio
Thank you for your comments, Cambio.
Most parking companies will also allow you to park subdomains, you just have to make sure that you have a wildcard dns entry (often “*.domain.com”) that directs all the domains to the parking provider. If you use the parking companies’ DNS this should be the default.
Unfortunately I am not aware of any parking company that optimizes the search terms based on the subdomain, which could be quite useful in some cases.
/Frank M
GoDaddy defaults to a wildcard DNS entry on parked pages.
[...] Rumors that domain registrar Dotster is for sale have been around for several years now in the market. Now new rumors have surfaced on ThreadWatch saying that Dotster is in financial trouble and has started laying off high paid staff. Maybe it’s just the sign of a restructuring though. Dotster has a large user base and the company has bought many other registrars over the years, including DotRegistrar, which went out of business a while back. In October of last year, they closed their aftermarket site, NameWinner and transferred most of their dropping names to SnapNames instead. Their name also popped up in the news in June, when it was publicly pointed out that they will “wildcard-park” subdomains of your names, if you use their DNS. [...]