The registrations by Sipence were tied to an Afilias promotion offering .info names to registrars at promotional rates. Afilias’ Heather Carle said the terms of the promotion were confidential, and would not say whether the domains were offered at no cost to the registrars. NameSecure, Dotster and Hostway are also offering .info names for free, while DomainSite is not far behind at 99 cents for .info names.

“We looked at this promotion as a way to focus attention on .info,” said Carle. “We haven’t had this kind of aggressive promotion of .info by registrars before.”

Afilias, which maintains the .info top-level domain, processed 1 million .info domains in a 36-hour period, a thousand times the average daily load on its system, according to Carle. About 1.5 million .info domains were registered in the first three years of the TLD’s availability.

The huge volume may have temporarily slowed the deployment of some .info names, but only because the DNS system places restrictions of the number of simultaneous submissions from a registrar. “With a million requests over 36 hours, they were queued,” said Carle, so that although Afilias handled the volume, “it might have taken longer for some of the registrations to go through.”