Domain tasting is not new, but it has grown to gigantic proportions over the last year. This article describes a method to find out which nameservers are being used for domain tasting, and where to go from there if you want to find out more.

The really big domain tasters use automated systems to register and drop millions of domain names every month without paying a dime (read about the scale of the problem and how it works here). Their systems often also snap up dropped domain names as soon as they become available.

If you want to find out who is doing this, here is how to start:
Armed with the simple knowledge that automated domain tasting gains and loses (drops) a very large amount of domain names every month, usually far more than they actually “hold/own”, we can use the Ipwalk.com web site to investigate which nameservers are involved in domain tasting. (Ipwalk.com has public statistics for all the nameservers connected to gTLDs (such as .com, .net, .org, etc.).)

Step 1: Find likely candidates
Go to www.ipwalk.com and select a country. The United States has by far the largest amount of domain names, so we will start there (the first page for USA):

United States, in April (select monthly view, at the top of the page):

(This table can be sorted by “gain” or “loss” for an even better overview, since the big domain tasters gain and lose a lot of domain names, but that requires you to be logged in. The things described in this article can all be done without being logged in to the Ipwalk.com site.)

We have marked the rows of interest in the table above (rows 2, 6, 8 and 13). These have all gained and lost far more domain names than they actually hold.

In this example, we are going to take a closer look at “my-name-server.com”. It has close to a whopping 17 million gained and lost domain names in April. Compare that to how many it is holding.

However, this alone is not enough to be sure. We need to check that the vast majority of the gain comes from new registrations, and that the vast majority of the loss comes from dropped domain names. (We need to be sure that the high numbers aren’t just the result of a massive amount of transfers, no matter how unlikely that may seem in this case.) This leads us to…

Step 2: Verify that it is domain tasting
Click on “my-name-server.com” in the table. Then select “gain and loss detailed” to come to this page (weekly or monthly view gives the best overview for our purpose, and can as always be selected at the top of the page).

There is a lot of information on that page, like where domain names are transferred to and from, but what we want right now is to check if “gain by new” is much larger than “gain by transfer”.

That answers that. Most weeks, less than 1% of the gains come from transfers.

Now we check the same thing for loss (farther down the same page).

Here we have about the same ratio as with gains, less than 1% of the losses come from transfers.

Found one!
It would appear that whoever is using my-name-server.com is using it for domain tasting.

(Small aside: nameservers are grouped by Ipwalk. For example, “server.com” would represent ns1.server.com, ns2.server.com, etc.)

Step 3? What comes next?
It could be interesting to study the transfers to and from these nameservers, but the purpose of this article is just to show you a method to track down which nameservers are being used for domain tasting.

So what next? For starters, you can go to your favorite WHOIS service and see who owns the domain name (of the nameservers), what nameservers it belongs to, etc. For example, my-name-server.com has been owned by a number of companies over the last year (which could or could not be run by the same people), among them a company called Domaincar. Here a service that offers the WHOIS history for domain names can come in handy.

Disclaimer: It should be pointed out that even though many consider domain tasting unethical, it is not illegal.

Footnote: My-name-server.com and Domaincar have been in the news before: