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Comment by jxcole | Hacker News Reader

I used name.com for a website once. I used them for my DNS also (because I don't know how to set up a separate DNS) and they parked there own auto-generated crap at everything except the www subdomain. Apparently, if you are savvy enough to set up your own DNS this isn't a problem, but I wouldn't use them because of this.

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I think if you set up a wildcard *.mydomain.com rule to forward to your domain, you won't see their stuff.

I'm not quite sure what you mean (though I'm not arguing). I set up my own DNS manually.

Create a rackspace cloud server, grab that IP and use it in an A record on name.com.

If you're using name.com's DNS, then they've basically got a wildcard subdomain that points to a spammy domain-parked page.

So, say you have valid records for .yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com. Those two hosts will resolve as you would expect them, but *.yourdomain.com will resolve to a spam page.

Wow, that's pretty evil. I definitely won't be using name.com (I've been happy with Dreamhost as a registrar for years anyway, but would be interested in trying someone else in the future). Thanks for the heads up.

So, if a user came and visited my site, which was www.zideck.com (It's not there any more), they would see my web page. If they were to visit http://zideck.com they would see auto generated spam garbage that said stuff like "What you need, when you need it." In fact, ANY subdomain would result in link spam trash.

Thanks for the tip on setting up DNS. If I create a rackspace cloud server, I imagine there is something special I have to do to make it a DNS server, right? Does it just work straight out of the box?

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