Engineering Update: Reliability, Stability, and Performance Enhancements

Over the past several months, our engineering team has delivered a wide range of changes to improve the reliability, stability, and performance at Unstoppable Domains. We are continually listening to customer feedback and striving to be the best registrar in terms of user experience, cost, reliability, and cutting-edge features. We hope you've already noticed our efforts in your day-to-day experience.

While the work to continuously enhance our platform is never truly complete, I’m excited to share a deep dive into the progress we've made.

We dramatically reduced our core application’s startup time, improving the ability to quickly deploy updates and scale effectively during high-traffic periods.

Result

• Application startup time: 160 seconds → under 10 seconds

User experience impact

When traffic spikes, like during $5 Friday, our systems automatically spin up additional servers to handle the increased load. Previously, each new server took nearly three minutes to come online. During that window, existing servers were shouldering all the traffic, which could result in slow page loads or timeouts. With these new optimizations, new servers are ready within 10 seconds, meaning the system responds to traffic spikes much faster and you experience fewer slowdowns during our busiest periods.

We’ve rewritten our slowest database queries, such as those related to domain portfolios and marketplace search. Deep analysis of our database usage patterns and user behavior allowed us to identify ways to improve our data load time as well as overall scaling capability. In addition, we updated our database monitoring with the ability to quickly identify future optimizations.

Result

• Portfolio load time: 30+ seconds for large portfolios → under 1 second
• Marketplace search: 5+ seconds → under 1 second
• Reduced memory usage for our infrastructure, allowing for higher scaling capacity during peak load times

User experience impact

Users with large portfolios now experience near-instant (under 1 second) loading times for their domain portfolios, a dramatic reduction from over 30 seconds. Marketplace searches are also significantly faster, loading in under a second instead of over 5 seconds, resulting in a much smoother, quicker experience when searching for domains.

We addressed multiple issues that caused some domains to get "stuck" during checkout, registration or transfer-in. These domains were a source of considerable frustration for users. We implemented an automatic monitoring and recovery system to maintain a smooth lifecycle for these situations, resulting in a dramatic reduction in customer support cases.

Result

• Support tickets for stuck domains: 3-4 per day → zero

User experience impact

Customers no longer encounter domains appearing unavailable due to abandoned carts, and domains appear in the user’s portfolio as expected after registration or transfer-in. 

Marketplace operations are now faster and more reliable thanks to the launch of instant listings. This improvement addresses previous issues where listing a domain involved slow, cumbersome and potentially failing blockchain signatures. Now you can still have the benefits of the blockchain, but handled automatically for you in the background.

Result

• Bulk listing performance: 500 domains listed in under 2 seconds
• Listings created instantly without waiting for wallet signatures
• Bulk operations (edit, cancel) now work reliably at scale

User experience impact

Sellers can list domains immediately and manage large portfolios without waiting for blockchain confirmations.

We shipped a new queueing system for bulk operations, addressing one of our users' top complaints. Previously, bulk operations on large portfolios could fail or stall, particularly when managing 200+ domains at once.

Result

• DNS updates and bulk operations now process reliably at scale
• Operations queue in the background, allowing users to navigate away without losing progress
• Reduced user complaints about "stuck" or failed bulk actions

User experience impact

Domain investors managing large portfolios need to make changes across hundreds or thousands of domains at once, such as updating DNS records, adjusting listing prices, or configuring nameservers. Our new queueing system ensures these operations complete more reliably, even for the largest portfolios.

We've implemented circuit breakers throughout our infrastructure, a well known software design pattern used to isolate partial system failures from impacting the entire system. When any part of our system experiences issues, the circuit breakers reduce the impact.

Result

• Unaffected services continue running normally
• Clear status indicators instead of confusing errors
• Automatic recovery when issues resolve

User experience impact

More consistent service and faster resolution when issues occur. The implementation of the circuit breaker design pattern helps prevent cascading failures, meaning users of our registrar system are less likely to experience widespread outages and, when a temporary upstream issue does occur, service is restored more quickly.