Domain Parking Rates

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Vehicleentry to this car park is from Argyle Street (between Collins and Liverpool streets), with pedestrian access from Wellington Court and Wellington Centre. There are eight disabled access parking spaces that are all located in close proximity to the elevators. There are 1155 parking bays, with a height restriction of 2 metres.

Access directly to the Wellington Centre and Royal Hobart Hospital via the skybridge is available on Level 3 of the Woolworths side of the car park. There are additional accessible parking spaces and pay stations located at the walkway to these services.

The City of Hobart operates a free wheelchair hire scheme for people shopping in the city centre for a few hours. For enquiries about wheelchair availability please phone 03 6238 2780. More information about accessible transport options within the City of Hobart is available on our accessible transport and parking page.

Vehicle entry to this car park is from Victoria Street, with pedestrian entry available from Victoria and Murray Streets, and Centrepoint Shopping Centre. There are 16 disabled parking spaces all in close proximity to the elevators. There are 782 parking bays, with a height restriction of 2.1 metres.

Vehicle entry to this car park is from Melville Street (between Elizabeth and Murray Streets), with pedestrian available from from Melville and Bathurst Streets. There are 10 disabled parking spaces all in close proximity to the elevators.

Short-term parking is available in the following car parks around Hobart. The payment method for these car parks is either by voucher or meter. You can find out more about these payment methods on the how to pay for parking page.

Information about the City of Hobart's parking fees and charges can be found on the fees and charges page. Note that prices are subject to change dependent on the services provided by the City of Hobart throughout the year.

City of Hobart's Pensioner Voucher Scheme makes parking cheaper for all pension card holders in our city. The scheme offers a book of parking vouchers to eligible Pension Card holders.

The Patient Assisted Travel Scheme (PATS) allows eligible patients and/or their families to park in any of the City of Hobart's multi-storey car parks for a reduced fee while using certain facilities.

Information on accessible transport options available in the City of Hobart, including parking, wheelchair hire and pensioner concession vouchers can be found on our accessible transport and parking page.

You will be required to provide your full name, email address and contact phone number in order to be placed on a wait list. You will also need to nominate for which car park/s you are seeking long-term monthly parking.

The City of Hobart acknowledges the Tasmanian Aboriginal People as the Traditional Owners and ongoing custodians of lutruwita, Tasmania. We pay our respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and to their Elders past, present and emerging.

Usually, the only cost associated with domain parking is the price of buying and renewing a domain name. That means you can expect to pay around 10-20 a year to keep a parked domain name. However, the cost will vary depending on the type of domain you have parked.

We have been detecting parked domains for more than nine years. From March to September 2020, we identified 5 million newly parked domains. In the same time frame, we observed that 6 million parked domains have transitioned to other categories. Out of the transitioned parked domains, 1.0% changed to malicious categories (such as phishing or malware); 2.6% changed to not safe for work categories (such as adult or gambling); and 30.6% changed to suspicious categories (such as questionable or high Risk). Compared to a benign domain (such as computer and internet info or shopping), a parked domain has an eight times higher probability of changing its category to one of the above non-benign categories.

Security best practice for enterprises is to keep close track of parked domains, while consumers should make sure that they type domain names correctly and double-check that the domain owners are trusted before entering any site.

Individuals and enterprises need to pay registrars (ICANN accredited domain resellers) an annual fee to buy domain names and become domain owners. If domain owners don't have content or service ready to point their domains to, they can leverage parking services to monetize user traffic. Setting up a parking service is simple and only requires domain owners to point their name server (NS) records to the parking service. In return, parking services will either present visitors with a list of advertisements or automatically redirect users to advertisers' webpages. In the first case, domain owners and parking services get paid when a user clicks on an ad, while in the second case, they get paid per user visit. Some domain owners buy large amounts of domain names as an investment to resell them later for a profit or to monetize user traffic. As shown by previous research studies and this blog, parked domains can pose significant threats to end-users. Because of this, along with their questionable utility, it may be best to block parked domains.

Palo Alto Networks has deployed a comprehensive pipeline to track newly parked domains and to publish the detection results to URL Filtering. Recently, we have launched the parked category in DNS Security as well. In particular, our pipeline:

To analyze the current parked domain landscape, we collected the parked domains that were detected from March to September 2020, as well as the ones whose category changed from parked to other categories in the same time span. On average, we found that 27,000 newly parked domains were identified and 35,000 existing parked domains were re-classified daily. In summary, our pipeline has identified 5 million newly parked domains and re-classified 6 million parked domains to other categories in the past six months.

Figure 1 summarizes how we observed parked domains changing during this time period. For simplicity, we group the URL Filtering categories into four classes: malicious, not safe for work, suspicious and benign. The malicious class consists of malware, command and control (C2), phishing and grayware. Adult, gambling and nudity are represented in the not safe for work class. For suspicious, we include questionable, insufficient content and high risk domains. Sites are deemed questionable based on suspicious web content, while the insufficient content category is normally applied to a blank website and high risk means the domain displays behavior similar to malicious domains. The benign class encompasses all other categories, such as business and economy, computer and internet info and shopping. Figure 1 shows that for parked domains, the malicious change rate is 1.0%, the not safe for work change rate is 2.6% and the suspicious change rate is 30.6%. As a comparison, the non-benign change rate of the parked category is eight times higher than the non-benign change rate of benign categories.

Figure 2 presents the distribution of the number of days that domains that we ultimately categorize as malicious and benign are parked before changing their category. We aggregate the number of category changes from parked for every 10 parked days and normalize by the total number of domains per class. Figure 2 shows that over 25.9% of parked domains that changed to malicious categories are parked for less than 10 days, which is significantly different from benign, where the majority of them are parked for around 60-69 days. We conjecture that many cybercriminals do not age their domains (a practice used to evade domain lifetime-based detection features) and use them to conduct attacks as soon as possible.

In this section, we further investigate the benefits of detecting and blocking parked domains. We begin by dissecting the domain parking ecosystem into different stakeholder groups. We then show that the largest attack vector is domain registration, since attackers can register parked domains and turn them malicious at any time. Second, we show that attackers can abuse the lack of advertisement control by some smaller advertisement networks used by parking services, thereby redirecting visitors to malicious or unwanted landing pages. Last, we show that even a parking service itself can pose privacy threats to users.

We show the major stakeholder groups in the domain parking ecosystem and their relationships in Figure 3, namely domain owners, parking service providers, advertisement networks and advertisers. Note that the term stakeholders as used here represents roles and can refer to the same entity or multiple entities. Domain owners own parked domains and have the incentive to monetize through parking service providers. Parking service providers incorporate and organize feeds from advertisement networks to monetize user traffic. Advertisement networks characterize user traffic from parked domains and present ads to users from interested advertisers.

Parked domains could present threats to users when they turn malicious. Figure 1 shows that 1.0% of parked domains eventually changed to malicious categories such as C2 and malware. Some attackers appear to host parked pages on their domains before deploying malicious content, potentially to amortize their costs.

Figure 6. The ad listing page often seen while visiting peoplesvote[.]uk.Figure 7. The voting preference landing page that is sometimes seen after visiting peoplesvote[.]uk and being redirected to a survey website.Furthermore, we observed attackers abusing the largest dedicated parking service provider, Sedo. We found a parked domain, xifinity[.]com, that is a typosquatting domain mimicking xfinity[.]com (refer to our cybersquatting blog or this academic paper for more information). When a user attempts to visit the Xfinity website but accidentally types an additional "i," they will go to xifinity[.]com and will be redirected to an advertiser page. We identified that the traffic to this domain is sold to multiple advertisers. One of the advertisers, softonic[.]com, presents users with a software download page.

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