How the urgency score is calculated

Every domain in Namestead gets a “migration-urgency score” — a rough proxy for how much is riding on it, and therefore how carefully it needs to be handled if the underlying .name third-level shutdown forces a migration.

The formula

The score is computed once, at load time, in scripts/load-zone.ts. It adds up a fixed weight for each DNS signal the domain (or one of its subdomains) has — the more infrastructure depends on the name, the higher it scores:

Signal present	Weight	Why it counts
MX	+3	mail depending on this domain is the costliest thing to break
A or AAAA	+2	a live website, counted once even if both are set
TXT	+1	often SPF/DKIM — mail-adjacent, but not mail itself
NS	+1	an independent delegation, not just a subdomain
DNSSEC	+1	a signed zone is more operationally invested

score =
  (has_mx      ? 3 : 0) +
  (has_a || has_aaaa ? 2 : 0) +
  (has_txt     ? 1 : 0) +
  (has_ns      ? 1 : 0) +
  (has_dnssec  ? 1 : 0)

A worked example

A domain with its own NS delegation, an MX record, and a website (A or AAAA) — but no TXT record and no DNSSEC — scores 1 + 3 + 2 = 6. A bare domain with nothing but an NS delegation scores 1. A domain with every signal set scores the theoretical maximum of 3 + 2 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 8.

Why the real range tops out at 4, not 8

The domain search’s urgency-score filter is bounded to 1–4, not the formula’s theoretical 0–8. That’s not a shortcut — it’s what this dataset actually contains. No domain has score = 0, because every domain in the table was included precisely because it has at least one tracked signal (an NS delegation, at minimum). And nothing in this zone snapshot combines an MX record with a live website: no domain sets both has_mx and has_a/has_aaaa, so the +3 and +2 weights never stack, and the observed maximum settles at 4 — almost always an MX-plus-DNSSEC domain, occasionally a website with both its own NS delegation and DNSSEC set.

Score	Domains	Share
1	107,712	85.3%
2	3,635	2.9%
3	20	0.0%
4	14,928	11.8%

126,295 domains total, from Namestead’s zone snapshot.

Because the score is just a weighted sum of booleans, two very different domains can land on the same number — a bare website with only an A record, and a domain with its own NS delegation plus DNSSEC but no visible website at all, both score 2. Use the Signals filter alongside the score if you need to tell those cases apart.