Amazon buys AWS.com domain name

Company gets coveted domain name for its cloud business.

Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) has acquired the domain name AWS.com, Whois records indicate.

Historical Whois records at DomainTools show that the domain was transferred to Amazon.com this week, between September 11 and September 12.

The domain name was owned by AWS Convergence Technologies, Inc. Although the corporate relationships are a bit convoluted, the seller appears to be part of a company called Earth Networks that runs the site WeatherBug.com. (That’s further convoluted by a company name of GroundTruth on the WeatherBug website). (see updated below)

The oldest Whois record at DomainTools dates to 2001, showing Automated Weather Source as the registrant. But data in the Whois records since then all show a common owner. The domain was registered in 1995.

Amazon’s cloud business is Amazon Web Services, or AWS for short. The company recently started using the dot-brand domain name .AWS in marketing. Although I’m sure it has coveted the AWS.com domain name for many years, I wonder if traffic to the domain has increased since it began marketing domain names like BuildOn.AWS.

AWS.com does not resolve as of this morning.

Update: I received an email from the seller explaining the genesis of the company and why it was confusing to understand the corporate family:

Earth Networks was originally referred to as AWS Convergence Technologies, Inc. AWS stood for “Automated Weather Source”. We own and operate the world’s largest network of automated real-time, commercial-grade weather stations, as well as we also operate the world’s largest total lightning network (that can detect both in-cloud and cloud-to-ground lightning). We also operate an HD camera network and are getting into GHG networks as well. Therefore, our original company website was AWS.com.

We also created, owned, and operated the WeatherBug brand for years (WeatherBug.com and the WeatherBug apps). WeatherBug was the primary front-end gateway the public used to access the richness of our weather networks.

We later changed the name of the company from AWS Convergence Technologies, Inc. to Earth Networks to better align with our mission to “take the pulse of the planet”, as well as to further differentiate our weather service offerings from other organizations such as Amazon Web Services (although Earth Networks and Amazon Web Services have enjoyed partnership opportunities). We launched a new company website under earthnetworks.com, although we still had some legacy services tied to the aws.com domain, so we retained ownership of the domain until the sale of the domain to Amazon.

In late 2016, we sold the WeatherBug brand to xAd, Inc., which later changed their company name to GroundTruth. GroundTruth now owns and operates the WeatherBug brand, WeatherBug.com, and WeatherBug apps, although they still power their website with Earth Networks weather data. This link explains the transition:

https://www.earthnetworks.com/weatherbug/

Earth Networks has now transitioned more into an enterprise weather data services provider. We still own and operate the weather, lightning, camera, and GHG networks, plus we sell solutions that allow customers to install commercial-grade weather stations, lightning sensors, and cameras in their organizations, in addition to also offering enterprise-class weather services from our web-based weather visualization platform Sferic Maps to our weather data Sferic API to other exclusive weather data and alerting capabilities. Some of the most respected organizations across industries are relying on the power of the exclusive, commercial-grade weather data and networks we offer.