EnomCentral – increasing .com cost by $5

Posted on October 20, 2011 by Boost

Verisign have announced a small price rise:

… prices for .com registrations are set to increase from $7.34 to $7.85 while price for every .net registration will increase from $4.65 to $5.11

Registrars will be passing on the rise, and good ones like NameCheap are only raising their prices by 50c. Not EnomCentral – they’ve decided to take advantage of this by raising the cost of .com domains from $34.95 to $39.95 in January. I guess anyone crazy enough to pay such prices won’t really notice or care….

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NameCheap Deals for October

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Boost

SSL Certificate – PositiveSSL – $6.99 for the first year
(of course after a year you should have worked out the value/use you are getting from having a secure site)

Reseller Hosting Accounts now have Unlimited Domains
(so you can keep all of your websites in one place – if you deem NameCheap’s service to be sufficient for your needs)

Discounted Domains (com/net/org/biz) with – use OCTOBERFEST

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Recommended: Arvixe Hosting

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Boost

This is a genuine recommendation – I have been a happy Arvixe customer since May 2007. The most recent site I’ve used Arvixe for is Symbiotic Relationship (which is all about relationships between animals, for example a whale and a barnacle).

Arvixe have been operating since 2003, and they have a full range of hosting products at reasonable prices.

Here are some factors that help Arvixe stand out from the crowd:

  • SAS 70 Type II compliant (independently audited, this is a standard that most hosting companies have not aspired to achieving)
  • Redundant Network with Cisco-certified technical support - they utilise multiple Tier 1 Bandwidth providers, so basically if one goes down, they automatically switch to another. It is common for cheap hosts to not guarantee service if their provider is down…
  • Backup generators, in case the power grid goes down
  • 60 Day Money Back Guarantee – get a full refund ifyou aren’t happy
  • 24 Hour Support – they have always responded quickly to my requests
  • Safe Harbor compliant – guarantees data privacy
  • Daily Backups

In terms of product features, they have everything you’d expect like CPanel, Fantastico, and plenty of nice extras like Spamhaus & SpamCop Checks for your email. Storge and transfer is unlimited, and the only difference between the different shared server accounts is how many domains you host (6 or unlimited) and how busy the server is (personal has more clients per server than business).

Personal hosting for 6 sites is an incredible $4/month (if you sign up for 2 years, or $7 on a month by month basis). Unlimited sites is $7/month (or $10). Arvixe also offer reseller hosting, VPS and dedicated servers.

Their blog is updated a lot, and it shows off their deep technical knowledge, and their customer forum is well maintained.

Advanced Web Hosting for only $4/month

Check out their list of awards…

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Myths about the new TLDs

Posted on August 9, 2011 by Boost

Here are some interesting little factoids about the new TLDs that might clear up any confusions:

  • .info, .name, .mobi, .travel, .jobs and .xxx already exist, and they have not really changed the domain world much at all
  • there is unlikely to be a flood of new TLDs. It will cost $185K just to apply, and a popular, publicly available domain registry will be expensive to maintain.
  • they will not be approved until 2013

ICANN anticipates “between 300 to 1000″ new extensions will be created per year. I severely doubt it. There will certainly be a landrush in which global corporations like Apple will secure theirs. And I expect there to be perhaps fifty or so geographical TLDs, like .ny, and perhaps as many generic TLDs as well.

Yet, aside from the generics, the others might just hold off, because their claim to their TLD should be safe. Nobody except Microsoft will be allowed to have .microsoft, and nobody except Paris can have .paris (presuming Paris, Texas would make an application…)

Read more on the topic at Business Insider

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70% Off at Network Solutions

Posted on July 23, 2011 by Boost

Network Solutions are one of the more expensive registrars out there, but many customers, especially those with a single domain, don’t mind the extra cost because they are highly unlikely to go broke or disappear.

Right now you can get that security at very low prices. Until the end of September this code will get you 50% off for 1 year registrations, 60% for 2 years and 70% for 3 years (new registrations only). 70% means paying less than $9 for a .com.

SAVE70DAF

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Domain Name Index

Posted on July 16, 2011 by Boost

Founded by Thies Lindenthl, using data from Sedo, is the IDNX, an index of domain name sales index that reflects the health of the industry. While doesn’r represent all domain sales, it is large and international, and is certainly a big enough sample. As you can see, there is a close connection between the index, Google’s share price and Wall Street:

While interesting, the only use I can see for this is in sales negotiations, especially if combined with historical data of similar sales – well, blah.net sold for $5000 in 2009, and domains are up 60% since then…

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gTLDs for Everyone!

Posted on July 6, 2011 by Boost

(All you need is $185K for the application fee…)

gTLD stands for generic top level domain, and the new domains will be just like a .com or .net, but will be privately owned. The owners could use them purely for their own purposes, or on-sell domain names to third-parties.

Would-be gTLD owners have a bit of time to put on their thinking caps—the application period runs from January 12 to April 12, 2012, after which time ICANN will publish all the domains that were requested and people can raise objections to any of them. More at PC Mag.

So the implementation is almost a year away. There are already 22 gTLDs out there – all those that are not connected to a country, such as .biz. PC Mag has suggested a few that have a good chance to become reality:

.sex - I don’t think so, unless they find a way to distinguish themselves from the already approved .xxx

.games, .music, .movies - Apple and Amazon etc could fight over these.

.kids – in which only child-friendly sites would be approved. This would be awesome if an enterprise was willing to take on the risk. On-going monitoring would be essential.

There will certainly be some cities who will give it a go, say .nyc. $185K is small change from the tourism budgets of major cities. And I fully expect Microsoft to come up with yet another sub-brand and make a domain like .live.

We could even see a full circle, with .alt returning from the Usenet graveyard. If parents could white list all .kid sites and black list all .xxx and .alt, it would make filtering easier.

ps Welcome! This blog is dedicated to news and information on domain names and web hosting, see as they go hand in hand anyway.

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