
Domain name drop-catching
The business goal
Our client is a small web marketing agency from the Netherlands.
Their main business outlook is providing clients with websites and marketing, including copywriting and ads campaigns. For this project, the main goal was to make a simple tool that could help acquire domain names automatically. This allows for the client to be first in line to reserve a domain name once the previous reservation expires.
We have had previous experience with a similar project for a US client. The main challenges for such projects are that such systems should be constantly updated due to the competition on the market. The system is also susceptible to being deployed closer to the same Domain Registration System (DRS).
Technical side
Among other technologies, we used C/C++ for high load, mbedtls, protobuf and ZeroMQ. The tool also has a simple web interface written in PHP.
We developed a scalable high-performance backend system for communication with various DRS (domain registration systems) using EPP (Extensible Provisioning Protocol). The main purpose of the system is to gain (i.e. register on registrar’s account) dropped domain names that are of some point of interest. The system used brute force polling and efficiently distributed requests on all available connections to a target DRS. In addition, the system may act as a proxy allowing an end user to submit EPP commands to a target DRS and present responses. Startup system configuration is done via simple text configuration files. Having a variety of settings in those configuration files allows the system to be adaptive to various DRS in terms of communication policy.
Result
As a result, our client received a nice and powerful tool that helped to engage with more clients over the next year.
