Glitch costs registrar millions

On last Friday, a registrar named Name.com started a promotion that could have potentially cost the registrar millions.

“Buy a new .net TLD for $8.99 and get a new .com TLD for $1”

Sounds great right? This 24 hour promotion was better than anyone could ever expect. When adding a .net and .com to your shopping cart, the website made a decrease price adjustment to the .com price on the fly. But there was a small glitch that allowed customers to increase the years of the .com TLD that didn't increase the price over a dollar when you revisited the shopping cart.

If this information was leaked and went viral, countless customers would have been able to register new .com TLDs securely for 100 years for the price of a cheeseburger. I really can't image how much money they would have lost before they noticed the transaction/revenue ratio was not adding up in that 24 hour promotion period.

I called them up, and then told them about the glitch. They could easily duplicate the problem, and took care of it right away.

Click here to check out a different version of the story on my developer blog.

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