Immediate Demand for .ME Goes Sky High!

July 21, 2008; 10:10 AM

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Go Daddy received a Super Bowl-like spike in traffic and domain registrations - only it didn’t have anything to do with commercials or Go Daddy Girls. It was all about the .ME domain.

In the first 24 hours of registration, Go Daddy successfully registered more than 20,000 .ME names, making it the most successful new domain launch in Go Daddy’s history.

During the start of registration - requests for .ME came in at such a rapid pace that it caused slowness to the GoDaddy.com Web site. Go Daddy engineers immediately began deploying more servers for its site to withstand the spike in traffic. Within two hours, the site resumed normal operations.

As a result of the slowness, some Go Daddy customers registered domain names that were already taken or reserved by the .ME registry(a) before launch -- for government use or to be released at a later date. Once the site stabilized, Go Daddy began notifying customers of the invalid registrations and started processing refunds.

"In spite of a few early difficulties - GoDaddy.com successfully processed a huge, record-setting level of registrations. To the best of our knowledge, there have never been more registrations handled in one day during the ordinary course of business by any registrar in history," said Go Daddy CEO and Founder Bob Parsons. "It’s important to note, that in addition to the .ME onslaught we also successfully processed our normal business which averages one registration every second."

The .ME domain name is a great domain for individuals or businesses looking to uniquely express themselves online with a podcast, blog, online photo album, or Web site dedicated to their interests.

While there were great names registered the first day, there are plenty of high-quality names still available to the public.

Customers who want to secure their .ME domain can do so by visiting GoDaddy.com.

(a) To see the entire list of names reserved on the .ME registry, please visit: http://www.domain.me/index.php?page=6.

About The Go Daddy Group, Inc.

Go Daddy is a leading provider of services that enable individuals and businesses to establish, maintain and evolve an online presence. Go Daddy provides a variety of domain name registration plans and Web site design and hosting packages, as well as a broad array of on-demand services. These include products such as SSL Certificates, Domains by Proxy private registration, ecommerce Web site hosting, blog templates and blog software, podcast packages and online photo hosting. The Go Daddy Group, Inc. has more than 30 million domain names under management. Go Daddy registers, renews or transfers a domain name every second. GoDaddy.com is the world’s No. 1 domain name registrar according to Name Intelligence, Inc. GoDaddy.com is also rated the world’s largest hostname provider according to Netcraft Ltd. During 2007, The Go Daddy Group registered more than one-third of all domain names registered in the top six generic top-level domains, or gTLDs, including .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz and .mobi.

Source: www.businesswire.com