Subject: Re: [eppext] Extension Registration Request: Registry Fee Extension for the Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP)

From: Keith Gaughan <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 06 Aug 2015 15:38:57 +0100

A bit late to the party on this one, but I feel some registrar input is
needed.

On 13/02/15 13:13, Gavin Brown wrote:

> On 11/02/2015 02:19, Ning Kong wrote:
> 
>> #2 IMO, the extension of <check> is not necessary. It seems that 
>> the extended <check> is a little overused. I think the extension
>> of <info> is enough.

That's akin to suggesting that <check> should be dropped from EPP
itself, given its work could technically be performed with a bunch of
<info> requests.

<check> is essentially a quick path for registrars to get basic
metadata about a given set names in a single transaction. That's all
the <check> Fee extension is allowing, and that's why it's valuable.

> There has been some discussion of this point on this list; there 
> seemed to be no consensus for using <check> only or <info> only.
> In the interests of pleasing the most number of people, I chose to 
> support both.
> 
> I would be happy to revisit this question again as my personal 
> preference would be to only support one query command.

I *strongly* recommend keeping the <check> extension. For our purposes,
it's actually more useful on <check> than on <info> as we often have to
check for whether a domain is registered or not, and also its price
category to decided whether we can sell it or not. Having to rely on
<info> to get that information would mean the number of requests we
would have to make would balloon quite quickly, which would negatively
affect our ability to deal with registries using the Fee extension, and
sell such domains. If the registry supports pipelining, this is
slightly less of an issue, but pipelining support can be hit-and-miss,
and the additional overhead of using multiple <info> requests, even
with pipelining is still far from insignificant.

The overhead to the registry to support the <check> extension isn't
terribly great, and the benefits to registrars are huge.

We already have this issue with Rightside/Donuts, who require that we
do individual <info> requests to figure out if a domain is subject to
premium pricing. This impacts how quickly we can get results back to
a customer as the results are rarely worth caching, and even under the
best of conditions, the customer gets their results back more that two
or three times slower for those domains than their otherwise would if
the information was returned in <check>.

K.

- -- 
Keith Gaughan, Development Lead; PGP/GPG key ID: D5FC9D23
Blacknight Internet Solutions Ltd. <http://blacknight.host/>
12A Barrowside Business Park, Carlow, R93 X265, Ireland
Registered in Ireland, Company No.: 370845