Update: there is a correction to this article, about the new Moniker. Original article follows:
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Twenty years ago, Moniker was considered the most secure domain registrar. Domain investors who wanted to sleep well at night, moved their domains to Moniker.com; transfers out required manual actions of its staff, after a strict verification protocol.
Moniker wasn’t the cheapest registrar at the time and on average a .com cost $2 or more to register or renew there. These were the years that GoDaddy was growing its customer base without being greedy with its retail domain pricing that now exceeds $20 for .com registrations.
In 2024, Moniker is about to relaunch as a domain registrar that targets domain investors. Not every bell and whistle is ready yet but a lot of desired features are there.
Marc works at Moniker and in a fresh thread over at NamePros, he said:
“The main feature of the platform is just good, solid bulk domain management but there are few nice tools worth looking at. We have an external domain tracker which you can post your whole domain portfolio in and we will pull the expiry date, registrar and in most cases the renewal price, you can then get additional renewal reminders from us for those names and use our DNS. We have just added a “Treasury” folder where you can put your highest value names behind an additional layer of 2FA, we’ll be adding extra features to this that we think will be really helpful very soon. We also have a filterable Daily Drop feed which picks up the Verisign .com/.net feed and let’s you filter based on length and a star rating.
In all honesty, the biggest shift for us is that we have moved from a system that had to support Moniker and another brand which catered more to Retail customers (i.e. 1 or 2 domains plus hosting) and we are now on a dedicated system which we can focus on Domain Investors.”
While Moniker Marc said that the system will be presented at NamesCon, we were able to access a first look of its main interface, as seen below:
The Moniker Dashboard displays a series of removable widgets that are color-coded, visually separating different functions and operation on one’s account. It’s nice and clean and quite customizable.
Here is the Moniker Dashboard after we added a few more widgets.
Moniker will also be offering cPanel based web hosting. One has to remember that since Oakley Capital acquired cPanel in 2018, the company moved to tiered pricing; hence the rather Spartan look of each hosting plan, as far as the number of domains goes.
As Moniker Marc already said, security and 2FA options are a must on the new Moniker. It’s great seeing some rudimentary geo-fencing as well, that whitelists one’s countries of choice.
Overall, it seems that Moniker will make a comeback that might attract quite a few domain investors there, if the price is right.
