OzWebMasters

Not happy with having a tidy little monopoly on aspects of the domain name business, they’ve now begun a very sneeky, dirty tactic. Basically, if you use NS for hosting, and someone visits a page on your site that doesn’t exist, they serve ads and keep the profits. Not only is this unethical, it can damage the reputation of your site.

Yes, they mention it in their T&C (amongst 59,000 other words), and yes it is possible to turn it off, but the default is on.

Read more here, and if you are a Network Solutions customer, consider voting with your feet.

Late last year was this announcement:

auDA, the .au Domain Administrator, today announced the 1 millionth .au domain name had been registered.

‘We are pleased to announce that the 1 millionth .au domain registration is elite-finance.com.au’ said Chris Disspain, auDA’s CEO. ‘We congratulate the Registrant of elite-finance.com.au for being part of this momentous occasion.’

And it is “under construction”. I’d be interested to know how manyare actually being used. I know I have more in the “to do” pile than what I am actually using.

Because 99% of all web hosts and domain registrars are just normal, it’s easy to neglect to read the T&C when making a $10 transaction.

Unfortunately, you can lose out big-time…

As it turned out, neither of these clients owned the domain names that they had purchased through Homestead.com. Unless the client was willing to use Homestead’s templates or Homestead’s ‘professional’ designers, they were not allowed to use the domain and hosting they had purchased.

EasySpace in the UK used to be similar.

Miriam Ellis suggests that when buying a you can build a professional website in just minutes service, check the T&Cs very carefully.

Aaron Goldman has found a topic for a blog that will never run out of material - he discusses URLs and whether they are good or bad. An example of bad is the funny SpeedOfArts.com, which could also spell “speedo farts”.

His rules on what makes a good or bad URL are worth paying attention to:

Dos

1. CapitalizeTheFirstLetterOfEachWord.

2. Whenever possible, use YourBrandName.com.

3. If .com is not available, use YourBrandName.net.

4. If .com and .net are taken, find a new brand name. Seriously.

5. Use YourSlogan.com when running an integrated media campaign.

6. Use subdomains when driving people deeper than your homepage — e.g. Product.YourBrandName.com.

Don’ts

1. Don’t include www. We know to go to the World Wide Web to find you.

2. Don’t include http://. If your audience isn’t Web-savvy enough to know where to type the URL, you shouldn’t have a Web site.

3. don’tusealllowercase (canyoureallytellwhereonewordendsandthenextbegins?)

4. DITTOFORALLUPPERCASE

5. No-hyphens/or slashes.

6. Don’t use acronyms, abbreviations, or numbers unless your brand is widely known as such.

7. Don’t bury your URL at the bottom of a billboard. I’m the only nerd driving around with a 4x zoom lens to find URLs.

This is kinda daft, but that’s ok once in a while:

1. “Who Represents” is where you can find the name of the agent that represents any celebrity. Their Web site is http://www.whorepresents.com/

2 . Experts Exchange is a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views at http://www.expertsexchange.com/

3. Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island at http://www.penisland.net/

4. Need a therapist? Try Therapist Finder at http://www.therapistfinder.com/

5. There’s the Italian Power Generator company, http://www.powergenitalia.com/

6. And don’t forget the Mole Station Native Nursery in New South Wales http://www.molestationnursery.com/

7. If you’re looking for IP computer software, there’s always http://www.ipanywhere.com/

8. The First Cumming Methodist Church Web site is http://www.cummingfirst.com/

9. And the designers at Speed of Art await you at their wacky Web site, http://www.speedofart.com/

I just found this on a forum:

The reseller, uk-cheapest does not respond to any support tickets or emails and I have contacted directly the registrar resellone.net to see if they can do somethin, but am getting no response from them either.

Its like these 2 companies have just stopped operating and the sites are still up ad they are still accepting payments, as I tried to transfer the domains elsewhere and their site took the money to do it, but again, nohing happened.

I contacted ICANN who told me to contact Verisign, who told me to contact the registrar and so on I am being sent in circles.

When it comes to technology, it pays to choose the most popular & reputable brands. Go with GoDaddy, or even Network Solutions if price is not important

I was updating the content on my page of Free SMS Services, and noticed that, as you’d expect, several of these had disappeared without a trace. That’s not so bad, I just remove the link and move on…

…except there’s something else I could do - check to see if the domain name has expired. In this instance one of them, MentionIt.com.au was expired, and 5 minutes later (after paying $25 to Hostess) I owned it. The beauty of doing this is that already has links to it from 57 other sites, mostly ringtone/SMS related. Once I’ve added some content, there’s no reason why it can’t have a Google PageRank of 3 or 4, be receiving free search visitors, and generating an affiliate income via ads for SMS or ringtone services.

You won’t find one of these every day, but they can be an easy way to make a quick buck if you catch one.

Well, my site (GoogleFan.com) was hacked, but I figure I should blame my hosting service, in conjunction with this terrible American trait of never admitting to fault or failure…

Last week I got an email from RoutHost saying:

Please be informed that the CPanel password for your website has been changed as a security measure. The new password is as below:

It wasn’t until days later that I found out that my site had been replaced with a hacker message, which in part said:

GreetZ to all defacers and all redefacers : You sux ._

If RoutHost had told me the complete story (ie “hackers gained access, please check your site”), I could’ve fixed up my site sooner - fortunately for me, my site was not affected in the long-term in any way.

Lessons learned:

1) Often with hosting you get what you pay for
2) Be it manually or automatedly, check your site every day!

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RoutHost have written to me and said:

Actually let me clarify why did we changed all the passwords on the server where your account is - few accounts got compromised indeed, so we did this as a security measure. When we searched why such accounts got compromised we found that most reasons were:

1) Old not updated scripts that were having a security breech. We’re strongly suggesting to our customers to have all their scripts up to date.
2) Having passwords in a publicly accessible files, which we find absolutetly unacceptable.
3) Easy to guess passwords. We suggest having at least 6 characters long password with combination of upper and lower case together with a number in it.

All Registerfly accounts will be transferred to GoDaddy. This is great news, especially for people like myself who use GoDaddy for most of their domains already.
And it is great news for GoDaddy (who have 20 million domains), who will pick up an extra 850,000 domains to look after. They have said they aren’t buying RegisterFly, but presumably they have paid them something - my guess is between $1 & $2 per domain.

Whenever someone asks me whether they should buy an .com or a .com.au, I mention the public perception of .com.au being relatively free of spam and crap. This is because you need to be based in Australia to buy one, because they cost more, and because they cannot easily be re-sold or transferred. It’s a stamp of quality, a badge of honour.

Melbourne IT, the big for-profit company (was originally a non-profit org, part of Melbourne Uni, and several directors quit in disgust when they decided to go the IPO route), is not happy with AUDA’s plan to loosen the rules - in fact I’m surprised it’s not the corporate business wanting the change, not the governing body.