Name.com hijacks non-existent subdomains and redirects to their servers

I ran into the same issue several years ago. Now I actively recommend against name.com because of this practice, which I consider very dodgy. Their support was unable to provide any real resolution to this and so I moved elsewhere. On recollection, I should have asked for my money back. Not for the meaningful amount that it cost, but to highlight how stupid this practice is. I'd encourage anyone with name.com to do the same as a form of protest.

A previous series of support emails:

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I own the joshka.net domain registered with name.com. When I attempt to resolve a subdomain that does not exist I expect this to return a NXDOMAIN result. Instead, the name.com name servers return an IP address of spammers.

How can I setup my account to return NXDOMAIN for this domain?

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Hello Joshua,

I have set your domain to a wildcard 'A' record, that accepts any subdomain, and points it to your hosting IP address. I ran a 'dig' [ping] command on 'stuff.joshka.net' as a test, please see the results below:

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I think we have a slight misunderstanding. I do not want a wildcard A record (and have removed the record that was setup). Resolving any subdomain that I have not explicitly created a DNS record should return a NXDOMAIN result. This expectation is in line with ICANN's memorandum titled "Harms and Concerns Posed by NXDOMAIN Substitution (DNS Wildcard and Similar Technologies) at Registry Level" at http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-2-24nov09... Providing this default wildcard service where it is not requested or required is a disservice. I can't imagine why I would want or need this.

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Hello Joshua,

I apologize for the misunderstanding with the wildcard DNS record. We have had multiple customers request this in the past, and this feature was used with success in those cases. I have consulted our management team to see if there is a different option that we can provide you. Please look for a response concerning this issue tomorrow.

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Thanks Elicia, I'll look forward to hearing from you. It's not the wildcard DNS itself that I couldn't see the use of. I understand why that would be useful in narrow situations. What I don't understand is why name.com provide the default wildcard A record redirecting to a site full of advertising. I don't know how this would be useful to any business or entity that does not want to use wildcard subdomains of their own.

I understand that section 19 of the registration agreement seems to cover this use of wildcards (though the wording is fairly vague), but it also states "At any time, you may disable the placeholder page by updating, modifying or otherwise changing the name servers for the relevant domain name."

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Thanks for getting back with us. Yes you are correct, by changing the DNS or name servers for this domain, it will no longer point to the parking page. I have discussed all options for allowing this wording to show, with our support management team, and the systems administration group. We sincerely apologize, however our DNS servers are not able to show the 'nxdomain' that you mentioned.

This option is possible should you wish to use your own custom name servers for this domain. Should you wish to setup your own name servers, here are instructions for registering these name servers from within your Name.com account

Second on namecheap. I use them for all my domains and they don't do any wildcard routing.

I actually just ran into this. I had a client forget to add a www CNAME record, so they thought the site was "hacked" when they added the www to their domain and got this parked site. Luckily, it's not a cached record, so when we fixed it, DNS servers started finding the right record immediately.

DNS aside, Name.com is one of the only registrars I know of with reasonable security practices.

They support two-factor auth (almost no one else does), and have nicely scoped cookies (HTTP only, Secure flag, etc.).

I'm in the process of switching to gandi.net. It's not as cheap as name.com (3 dollars difference...), but their DNS service seems really topnotch. Also, they're open to acting as a secondary DNS server and mirroring my own NS via AXFR, which is pretty nice.