What was your latest .ca inbound domain inquiry? (1.Viewing)

Yes I know a few realtors here, been a crazy year for real estate in this town, prices up, sales up, inventory super low. Any lot that was empty in town before 2020 is being built on now, some places you didn't even realize there was a lot. And construction going on everywhere in the outskirts of town too. Buyers come from everywhere, local, all across Canada, US, Europe, you name it. I'm surprised none of the realtors here have grabbed it from you yet. Even before covid it's a popular destination, people visit here once or twice then want to live here, lol.

Over ten years ago when I inquired to you about it, the market wasn't as great, I just wanted it because it's a nice looking domain and had some personal meaning living here. I have to make do with other real estate domains in this area, luckily was able to get an arrangement over time of trail/rossland/castlegar domains with either homes/realestate/realty in the .com and .ca But Nelson is hard to get. Was once in a tbr auction for nelsonrealestate and got outbid by what turned out to be a realtor here, or at least he ended up with it at some point. Was hoping it would get overlooked in tbr.

But if you ever see anything I have that you like I'm always open to talking trade! :D

rlm said:
I can't post every domain inquiry, but @domains you'll like this one: nelsonhomes
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Even if members can post the odd .ca inquiry they get that's great, it's interesting to see what domains people are after.

I'm sure there are some here who wouldn't want to post everything because it reveals a niche or specialty topic they'd like to keep private.

rlm said:
I can't post every domain inquiry, but @domains you'll like this one: nelsonhomes
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MapleDots said:
You have not owned that one for long though?
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Since February 19, where Swipe.ca went 3rd overall to Sibername (back when Siber actually delivered - they got 8 of the top 9).
 
MapleDots said:
Trust me from my talk with them Siber is going to deliver, they are investing heavily and it will show soon.
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I am really not sure on that one, as Siber has always been in Ottawa right next to the CIRA servers and that geographical proximity gave them a slight edge over the Toronto-based (and loaded for bear) MyID.

Now that they're moving the TBR operation to Montreal, I can only see MyID getting stronger.

Look at all the West Coast TBR providers - they are also-rans week in and week out, and with microseconds separating the winners, have an almost zero chance of hitting first.
 
But the number of server links is only part of it, and Siber already has quite a few links, and has done extremely well in the past, at least matching MyID most times and superseding them sometimes.

But since WHC has taken over and moved operations to their HQ in Montreal, the results have been dismal, with MyID winning the vast majority of the top 10-20 picks (last week 10 of 13, the week before 13 of 16, another week Siber totally died) which are the kind of horrible results I've never seen previously from Siber.

We can assume Siber still has at least the same number of TBR server links as a few months ago (they are contracted on a yearly basis) yet their results under WHC guidance has been incredibly poor by comparison. What changed? WHC purchased Siber and Siber moved from Ottawa to Montreal.

As RLM said, it's like WHC forgot to buy the "secret sauce".
 
DomainRecap said:
As RLM said, it's like WHC forgot to buy the "secret sauce".
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I think I was a little less kind in what I said.

CIRA made a change recently that allows more threads to be purchased without the need to be a separate incorporated registrar. Previously, it had always been 1 TBR thread per registrar. Unfortunately, this means we won't be able to count them up any more.

Each registrar is easily identifiable through whois, and over time, you could see which were related to any given TBR service. The following were the number of registrars (and thus TBR threads) that had more than 10. The next highest was less than half of Sibername's count.

Sibername - 11
FastWebserver - 17
MyID - 21
Pool - 40

Pool had at one time been fairly successful due to sheer numbers. However, after the Fury update, Pool clearly lost interest and never really made much of an attempt to fix their coding to be fury compatible and get this working again, despite my attempt to nag them into caring. Pool has apparently just wrote themselves out of the equation due to apathy.

FastWebserver would occasionally pull out a decent (but not top) domain, but for having 17 threads, they really underperform.

MyID seems to have a good combination of # of threads, and using them effectively. They garner more than their fair share.

And Sibername, they were _really_ punching above their weight with roughly half the threads as MyID. They clearly had some leg up on the competition that wasn't just # of threads. Until WHC entered...

Note that its difficult to know where any company's TBR servers are located because they're not made public, obviously they don't have to be using the same server as their website.

This is my take on the whole situation:

Every week, domains are won and lost in less than 1ms. Within that first 1ms, the top 4 or 5 domains are usually gone. To score one of these it would require incredibly precise timing and removing any potential variability in that timing to create reliability and predictability. The fewer network hops, the more reliable and fast that TBR connection is going to be. I would think that at $1000/thread/year, a more effective use of funds would be to rent the closest possible server making the threads you do have more effective, not just buying more threads.

Its been a long known tactic in the domain drop world to position your server as close as possible to the registry. I'm not sure why WHC is ignoring that.

Anyway, I really don't want to see a single registrar dominate TBR, whether it be MyID or Sibername or anyone else. I kinda wish there were more players that were competitive at this... The past year or so, both Siber & MyID really pushed out the rest of the competition. Was there a new secret sauce? Was it better synching and timing of their servers? Or did they just double down on the TBR threads and we just can't tell because of the new CIRA rule? I really don't know.
 
Not sure if your count is accurate anymore because the guys from Sibername told me they purchased a bunch more threads.

I talked quite in detail about this with the CEO of the company and he assured me that TBR was very high on their list and they aim to get it right. He said nobody can catch everything but he is going after a target of 70%.
 
Not sure about the details of the CIRA drop, the last documentation I read about it is a few years old, but I'd be surprised if all of the domains drop at once. Most TLDs drop them over time, so aside from the number of connections, connection optimization, connection speed, to get the timing right is another factor that matters. Paying for connections (usually for checking which domain will become available when) is quite common for ccTLDs, I know at least two others that handle it like that and in a way, it makes more sense than having to accredit a bunch of other registrars like you do have to do for gTLDs.

If one registrar caught everything, I'm sure CIRA would re-run the drop ;-)
 
MapleDots said:
Not sure if your count is accurate anymore because the guys from Sibername told me they purchased a bunch more threads.
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Yes, as mentioned, it is a little trickier to count newly purchased TBR threads. However, the #'s mentioned were accurate until the rule changed. I believe that on or before Apr 17, 2019, MyID was the first registrar to start using the newly purchased TBR threads that did NOT require a new registrar. They quietly did this while other registrars seemed to ignore the idea of expanding.

Regarding the drop, based on reviewing the weekly results, CIRA does drop all domains at once (they can do this because there really aren't that many worth going after, relatively speaking), so this simply doesn't really overwhelm the servers. We can tell this because the best domains ALWAYS go first. If it was random drip of domains dropping, a top domain could go 10 minutes after the hour. But it doesn't ever happen that way.

We can also see that domains are registered in batches, every 5 minutes. So what is happening is that CIRA must have a rule that each TBR thread can only make 1 request, every five minutes. So every registrar uses every attempt, timed as best as possible for that 0:00 top of the hour. Then 5 minutes later, they're allowed to reuse the same TBR thread to try again for anything left over. Then another 5 minutes later, another shot is allowed, and this repeats until there are no requests left to make.

In October and November, both Sibername and MyID were starting to consolidate their TBR threads under one name, so it appears that as old registrar contracts expired, they let them expire, but then replaced them with new TBR threads under a single registrar name. By November, Sibername ceased to exist as a TBR registrar, all had been renamed to WHC. Also, MyID had consolidated all of theirs under 2 different names, MyID.ca Inc and Creative Pixels Inc, which seems to have included throwing a few extra in there for good measure. And that also helps explain at least some of the recent MyID dominance.

Here are the minimum current counts I'm 99% sure of:

MyID.ca Inc. (14 TBR threads)
Creative Pixels Inc. (14 TBR threads)
Web Hosting Canada (7081936 Canada Inc.) (19 TBR Threads)

So MyID has at least 28 combined under 2 active registrar names, WHC has at least 19, all under one name.

They are the only two consistent TBR players. MyID is still clearly being the most aggressive and it shows in the results, It looks like they have about 50% more TBR threads than WHC. Just to be clear though, these are the minimum numbers I can count for each based on weekly results.

TBR is like a game of beer pong. MyID is playing from 4 feet back (close servers, more ping-pong balls) WHC is playing from 6 feet back (further servers, and less balls). And all the other TBR's are chucking their balls at the cups from about 20 feet back. I think that's a good analogy on what's going on here.
 
You know, I really hate this "thread" term, as when I talked to contacts at the CIRA they always referred to the new system as "TBR connections", as in "currently 1 connection per company". I got the technical breakdown in an email from CIRA when the change went through and it was all "multiple connections", "one connection per company and one order per 5 seconds" and "now registrars can add many connections under a single company".

When I hear "thread", I think the obvious, a single program execution level.

rlm said:
TBR is like a game of beer pong. MyID is playing from 4 feet back (close servers, more ping-pong balls) WHC is playing from 6 feet back (further servers, and less balls). And all the other TBR's are chucking their balls at the cups from about 20 feet back. I think that's a good analogy on what's going on here.
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That's a good one, and those poor registars on the west coast are absolutely hooped simply due to geography.

I believe there are multiple factors necessary to do well at the TBR:

1) Lots and lots of TBR connections.
2) Be in close geographical proximity to the CIRA in Ottawa.
3) Fast hardware & software, as well as experienced IT programmers and support staff to run and maintain it.
4) Proper preorder load balancing on the servers to maximize TBR wins.
 
I will have to talk to them again but I think they have more than 19 now.

They also said someone died right as they took over Sibername and I think that might have affected the crew or their performance. Not too sure because I did not want to press that issue being a bit personal and all.

I am going to watch and see what happens moving forward, it will be an interesting few weeks.
 
DomainRecap said:
You know, I really hate this "thread" term, as when I talked to contacts at the CIRA they always referred to the new system as "TBR connections"
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Ok, good to know, thread it is, just for you. :P

I guess I've always thought of it in terms of a thread because from a programming perspective I'd have a single process running, using multiple threads obviously with each one linked to a different registrar account (TBR connection). As its a single process, the threads would share a memory space allowing threads to communicate successes and failures with each other more easily than if they were separate processes.

In any case, I've never talked to CIRA about it. I'll try and call them connections from now on.
 
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rlm said:
Ok, good to know, thread it is, just for you. :P
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Don't feel limited by "connection" use anything that makes sense, such as "link", "interface", etc.

I guess I've always thought of it in terms of a thread because from a programming perspective.
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I know all about processing threads, and like I said, that is the main reason why I don't like the term - it makes no sense, as threads are a single program execution level while these are actually data links or connections - these terms already exist so there is no need for analogous alternates from processing, which if you wanted to be absolutely correct, should be hyper-threading, i.e. multiple threads (connections) from the same source processor (TBR registrar). :D
 
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