Instead of registering foo.com, and having bob.foo.com, they would register bobfoo.com - they had hundreds or thousands of certs, as a result, and had to renew

Instead of registering foo.com, and having bob.foo.com, they would register bobfoo.com - they had hundreds or thousands of certs, as a result, and had to renew them all annually or biannually. We didn't even manage all of the domains, we just had to renew the ones our group was responsible for, and it was in the dozens, and each form was ~30-40 actions to fill out correctly. I forget whether they were quarterly or we just ended up doing it all the time, but it was a maddening task. Part of the explosion was that domains were not just in one TLD, they were bobfoo.com bobfoo.bar bobfoo.xyz and in many cases regionalized to bobfoo.co.uk or whatever. It wasn't "domain hoarding", because if you registered bobfoo.info you'd just get UDRP'd by corporate anyway, and nobody really wanted domains of the form somelongnamebobfoo.com This was also before something like LetsEncrypt where you could automatically generate certs for programmatic usage, so they were all done manually.