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On April 21, 1999, ICANN announced Register.com was one of the first five testbed registrars for the competitive Shared Registry System. On June 7, the company began operations under this name as a paid registrar in the .com, .net and .org domains. It was the first of the five testbed registrars to come online. In 2000, Register.com issued an IPO and began trading on the NASDAQ under ticker symbol RCOM. By 2004 the company was managing over three million domain names and was listed by VeriSign as one of the top domain name registrars in the world. In 2005 Register.com developed a strategy and dedicated itself to focusing on small business and providing online services to serve that segment of the market. However in November of the same year Register.com was acquired by Vector Capital Corporation. Much of the Register.com staff spent a significant amount of time working on the acquisition with the unfortunate result that many of the strategic initiatives underway were placed on hold while a new management team was organized by Vector Capital Management. Prior to acquisition, the company completed a significant strategic initiative and received recognition for “An Outstanding Customer Service Experience” when it became the first Online Services Industry organization to receive the J.D. Power and Associates Call Center Certification. Register.com received this recognition again in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. With Vector's acquisition of Register.com, the company went private once again and stopped publicly trading on NASDAQ. Vector Capital, while searching for a full time CEO brought in David Moore as an interim CEO. The CEO search was expected to last three months. In reality the process to find a new CEO took approximately one year. During David Moore's tenure the company successfully focused on cost reduction through better business practices. In November, 2006 Larry Kutscher joined Register.com as Chief Executive Officer. Kutscher came to Register.com from Dun & Bradstreet where he served as Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Small Business Group. Under Kutscher’s leadership, Register.com continued the existing strategy of focusing on the needs of small business owners and entrepreneurs. The company employs about 400 people in the US, Canada and the UK. Register.com is headquartered in New York City with satellite offices in Baltimore, Maryland and London, England. Register.com’s Sales and Service center operates in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia; over 300 of Register.com’s employees are at this center. Since mid 2007 Register.com had also added an office in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Register.com's Halifax office employs almost 40 staff and is rapidly expanding. Register.com is one of the largest registration companies and has received positive reviews and awards for its products and customer service. The company currently has an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau. On April 1, 2009, Register.com suffered a major DDoS attack, downing thousands of web sites. The FBI and The Department of Homeland Security were engaged to assist. Services were restored through counter-measures and minimized the disruption; some services were unavailable for 3 days. Twitter, a social networking service, was used to update customers on the status throughout the attack. In January 2010, the Chinese search engine Baidu sued Register.com for gross negligence after an employee allegedly allowed a third party to access to Baidu's account despite them failing to pass basic security verification, allowing their website to be hijacked by the Iranian Cyber Army. in June 2010, the company entered negotiations to be privately sold to Web.com. Web.com has agreed to acquire Register.com for a price of $135 million, which will be financed with approximately $20 million in existing cash, proceeds from a new $110 million term loan and a $5 million seller note. |
