Well I did ask in my last sentence, and you haven't answered. I didn't then but I have now gone to your projects; I see reocities, the ww/webcam thing and your blog. I don't see anything like bluehost or linode provisioning domains to users. The reason for the slight snark at the start of my message I suppose is that it's hard to find a domain and yet in every thread like this you get a few people confessing to hoarding hundreds or even thousands. Sorry for being sceptical, and curious, about what you could possible need 50k domains for: you'll have to spell it out for me or ignore me I suppose.
Would a 45K servers co-location facility meet your requirements?
Or a couple of domain re-sellers that sell domains as part of their hosting package? (that use Moniker as their 'upstream').
> that it's hard to find a domain
I've never had that problem. You mean that you find it hard to find 'single word' or 'perfect descriptions' of common ideas, and that's true, but I'm fairly sure that you can find plenty of good domain names for exactly $8.
The value of a domain is directly proportional to the amount of time that you put in to it. Usually the people that complain about there not being any 'free' domains are really complaining that they can't get the domains they want. Not realizing perhaps that if the person currently holding their desired domain would not be holding it surely someone else would.
There are all kinds of arguments for/against holding a large number of domains, my own criterion has always been that if my idea isn't worth the $8/year fee for a domain then I should not even bother to write it out. If you come by 6 weeks later and have the same idea, and through sheer coincidence decide on the same name then you will have to be just a little bit more creative, but we all agree the value is in the execution, not in the domain name.
Google.com was worth $8 when they got it first, and at that time the same complaint was often heard.
It's like the DNS variation on the HN/Reddit theme, and I figure as long as the DNS is the prevalent method of locating hosts this will continue to be the case.
In a few years time all the 6 letter domains will be gone, etc. But there are an awful lot of possibilities there, 300M+, someone did some work to prove just how likely it is that some pronounceable domain is gone:
