Become a Domain Spy - Investigate Yourself

WHOIS – Be a Domain Spy!!

You may come across an irresistible offer to buy a domain name on a forum like Digital Point or on ebay and you just want to go ahead and buy it, however before you buy, you wish to confirm the credentials of seller, details of domain and location of web servers. Or, you really like things about a website such as speed, performance and other things, and intend to host your site at the same place. Another scenario could be that you would like to contact domain admin for some reason but the site doesn’t provide you the link to contact. How would you find out all this information from the net? The answer is rather simple — just do a WHOIS and you would get a whole lot of information, that is otherwise not available to you.

What is WHOIS
WHOIS (pronounced “who is”) is a TCP-based query/response protocol which is used for querying an official database in order to determine the owner of a domain name, an IP address, or an autonomous system number on the Internet.

There are command line utilities to do whois, along with modern net based tools that give you information about a domain name and web site. These tools and utilities query WHOIS servers and provide standard information. Web-based WHOIS clients rely on the WHOIS protocol to connect to a WHOIS server and do lookups, and command-line WHOIS clients, where ever available are used by system administrators.

The WHOIS system originated as a method that system administrators could use to look up information to contact other IP address or domain name administrators.

How To WHOIS
As mentioned above, there are command line utilities mostly available on *nix platform in as open source software. One can create there own WHOIS clients using Java, C or other languages to run on their specific platforms. Web based WHOIS is most popular where you just have to feed domain name and you are presented the information, mostly text on your web browser almost instantly.

Where To WHOIS
Comman Line utilities: You may download a number of utilities available on the web as free ware or paid software for Windows. One utility I have tried and tested is available here. Unix has inbuilt commandline utility. If you would like to compile your own Java Client, a sample code is available here.

Web Based:
Pubdomains.com WHOIS
Pubdomains.in Whois

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Key Information Extracted from WHOIS
Most of WHOIS servers provide following information :

• Domain Name – This is the domain you wish to investigate.
• Registrar – The company the domain is registered with – like http://www.pubdomains.com
• Creation Date – Tells you the date the domain name was created on.
• Expiration Date – This is when the domain name expires.
• Updated Date - Tells you when information on the whois record was updated. This could pertain to addresses, nameservers, or simply if the domain was renewed for another year.
• Registrant Contact – This is who owns the domain.
• Administrative Contact – This is who is in charge of the domain.
• Technical Contact – This is who you contact if there’s a problem.
• Billing Contact – This is who pays for the domain.
• Whois Server – The whois database this information came from.
• Referral URL – This is who you talk to if you want to make changes to the domain name.
• Nameserver – First nameserver (also called the primary nameserver)
• Nameserver – Second nameserver. (also called the secondary nameserver)
• Nameserver - This domain has a third nameserver as well: you can have as many as needed, although the norm is two. Depending on which whois service you use, you may also see the IP addresses associated with the nameservers.
• The nameservers generally will tell you where a domain is hosted. You can do a whois search on the nameservers to get more info on the host itself.
  

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As an example if we wish to find out more about a domain registered on pubdomains.com, we feed domain name vu2.in in the web based interface and get following information

Registered through: Pubdomains – (Public Domains Registrars http://www.pubdomains.com)
Domain Name: VU2.IN
Created on: 11-Oct-08
Expires on: 11-Oct-09
Last Updated on: 20-Dec-08

Administrative Contact:
Name, Address
Delhi, 110035
India

Technical Contact:
Name, Address
Delhi, 110035
India

Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.PUBDOMAINS.IN
NS2.PUBDOMAINS.IN
Registry Status: ok

Note: If the registrant has privacy against whois, you wouldn’t be able to check the credentials of the site.

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To your success,
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Does Domain Name Matter

Everyone is spending crazy amount of money to buy a domain name for themself or for their business presence online. A fair amount of research goes to identify a good domain name, which is the starting point for any new business. Did I say good domain name? Ah you won't settle for anything that is good, well, I withdraw my words, I know you are looking for "The Best Domain Name" and you would not settle for anything less.

On similar topic I had posted my views "Does Domain Name Matter" a little while back. Today I am revisiting the topic with a new perspective. When you started your business, with no office in prime location with primary contact as your landline or cellular number and an email id that was most probably on usa.net or yahoo (gmail has been in existence for relatively lesser time). How did you go about marketing your services or business to others? What were you marketing then? What does a customer expect to get from you? In all probability, if you are a small business owner, I believe you never paid attention or huge sum of money to invest in a fancy telephone number, you just advertised what you had. That is it.

No one was coming to you because you called your house / office with a fancy name. Your customers came to you because you provided a service, and that you were good at providing that service as compared to your competitors. A business card was more than enough to provide details on how to contact you; your postal address for any snailmail - letter, a number to send and receive fax and a contact number to speak with you. Very little attention was paid if you were conducting your business from your garage or in a posh location. With advent of internet, somehow everyone has lost track how business was conducted a few years ago. Amazing amount of money is being wasted to get a short and sweet domain name but is it really that important to have a short and easy to remember domain name? Isn't the service that you provide more important than easy to type in URL address?

Times have changed, so has technology. Just as few people have the good habit of storing your business card, many and believe me -- there are many intelligent people who know how to use bookmarks and favourites to store the links they intend to visit. Browsers are changing with time and give you option to autofill just as you type first few letters in address bar. There are also options like Google History which would track all sites that you have visited, just in case you don't remember where all you have been.

Let's also look how you used to get visitors to your office / business a few years back -- Advertizing has not changed despite improved technology, and brand has to be built, just by getting a good domain name doesn't guarantee you get the traffic that is important to you. You may get a million hits because of your domain name, but if you can't convert even one into a customer for yourself -- is it worth the investment?

A recent study indicates that about 64% of internet users type Google.com or Yahoo.com to search for information they are looking for, and most likely if you visit your site statistics you would realize that majority of hits to your website has come from search engines -- which showed your link not because of your good domain name, but because your website had content that was worth to share and display to the person who searched.

Having said that, I still would not advocate you to buy a domain name that is not realted to your business or hobby or profession. It should and it must be related, it serves no purpose that a technology company buys a domain name like gettherightshoes.com, however there is no point to feel low if you didn't get besttechnologycompany.com domain to yourself.

Check Alexa ranking for top 10 sites -- Yahoo.com leads the list, followed by Google, Youtube, Windows Live, Microsoft Network, MySpace, Wikipedia , Facebook and Blogger in descending order. How many of these do you associate with business that they are doing? How is Google related to search and youtube for video sharing? The name doesn't really give a clue, but despite that you do know that if you wish to search -- you have choice from Yahoo, Google and Windows Live. Why do you remember that? When you have a need to remember, you would remember, that is why Wikipedia (spelling isn't really that easy to remember -- but you do, and in case you don't you actually go to google, type wiki and search) gets hits from direct and indirect (search engine driven traffic).

So friends, go ahead and build a brand, the name is important, but more then the name, it is the content that is the MOST IMPORTANT resource that you should be investing in, in terms of time and money. Any domain name would serve the purpose just like any building can serve as your office, as long as you stock the material that people want from you.

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Where are all good Domain Names gone?

Often when your creative juices flow and you get the grand idea for a domain name that is just right for you, your organization or anything that you intend to do ... and you want to buy it for yourself, you often end up doing a search only to find that someone has already bought it. Not only did that someone buy it before you, they did it long long back, when you didn't think you would host a website, or even register a domain name. It is frustrating, I know so what are the choices when you don't get a domain name of your choice?

A. Check if domain name which you want to buy is available for selling by its existing owner. There are many people who register domains only to sell it back at a premium. They invest their money with the view that someone would be interested to pay extra to get the domain name from them.

B. If domain is parked with SEDO or GoDaddy for sale - you can bid for the domain name. This is open auction, and entirely dependent upon the top bidding.

C. Check forums for domain sellers - DNForum is one place where folks auction the domains in their possession. There are many forums where the transaction is directly between seller and buyer. Word of caution though, you may get duped (pay and never receive your domain name because the seller never owned the domain)

D. If the cost of buying from options above is prohibitive, explore other options!!!

I would continue on what these options can be in next post. For now, if you have identified a name that should go with your hobby, goal, business or whatever and if you want to buy that domain name, check if it is available. If it is not available, check the web site and see if it is a parked page or is there a valid portal / content. Based on your research if you feel owner would be willing to sell, contact them (will cover how to find the owner later). If the domain is parked, you may have to enter bidding or outright purchase from brokers like Sedo.com who would assist you in buying a domain available with sellers.

Watch this space for more!!!

Domain Name & Domain Name System (DNS)

We discussed what is a domain name, and what purpose does it serve on the world wide web. So we have domain name that points to an IP Address of a web server, which is used for hosting a website. The key element that is used for domain name resolution from domain name to IP Address is Domain Name System (DNS) which we are going to read about now... (i.e. if you are interested - :))

What does Domain Name System (DNS) Do?
We all have used phone directory, or as you have in mobiles, or computers now - an address book. Imagine if you could only save telephone numbers without the ability to associate that number to any name, Scary thought isn't it!!! Well a domain name system does exactly the same thing that an address book does. So while you search for a name to place a call, internally your mobile is going to dial the mobile number associated with the name that has been stored by you. On the World Wide Web, this address book is the Domain Name System (DNS) that translates domain name like http://www.vu2.in to it's IP Address like eg. 209.51.196.242 for the browser and all associated networking components need to establish a connection, fetch information or deliver information from your machine to server and from the web server to your machine. Further to address book analogy for Domain Name System, just like you have the ability to store a contacts name, date of birth, anniversary information, Email Address etc, similarly a Domain Name System (DNS) stores list of mail exchange servers that would accept email for particular domain name apart from other entries for a particular domain.

How does Domain Name System (DNS) work?
In computers, files store information, and these files have a structure that is similar to trees, thus the data structure is called a tree, where each leaf of the tree represents information for a domain. The information thus stored for a domain name is called a resource record. The tree is further divided into zones. A zone is made up of such leaves, or normally called nodes which are served by an authoritative DNS nameserver. The Domain Name System consists of a set of DNS Servers. Each domain or sub domain would have one or more authoritative DNS server to provide relevant information about that domain, and the name servers of any domains beneath it. The starting point is the main nameserver - technically known as root nameserver. Root Nameserver is the server which handles the query to resolve a top level domain (TLD) name like http://www.vu2.in.

How do you find IP Address for a domain name?
If you wonder how to find an IP Address for a given domain name, all you have to do is to use command prompt and make use of any of the following command to get the actual IP being used.
1. PING
When you ping a domain name, you would instantly get IP Address of the Domain (after resolution by DNS) as shown below:
Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.
C:\>ping www.vu2.in

Pinging www.vu2.in [209.51.196.242] with 32 bytes of data:...

2. TRACERT
Like ping, tracert utility also allows you to fetch IP Address associated with a domain name as shown below

C:\>tracert www.vu2.in

Tracing route to www.vu2.in [209.51.196.242]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 One thing we must bear in mind is that while domain names are unique, multiple websites could share same hostname. Virtual hosting is used to host multiple websites on one machine or web server, and hence there is no one-to-one relationship between hostname and IP Address.

Finally a quick recap
a. DNS : Domain Name System (DNS)
b. Address Book for websites on the internet.
c. Stores mapping of domain name with IP Address / web server information.
d. Information for each domain name is stored in a tree like data structure on DNS Server.
e. Each leaf stores record for one domain name.
f. These leaves are called resource records.
g. Collection of leaves make up a zone.
h. Domain Name System (DNS) stores other information as well apart from name resolution.
i. You can get IP address for any domain using utilities like PING or TRACERT.

Next we would look at how things were before Domain Name System (DNS) came into existence ... Keep watching this space for more :)

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Why use a Domain Name?

A domain name is a unique word combination used as identifier to identify a web site on the World Wide Web. While computers talk in the binary language (I hope you know this one -- There are 10 types of people.. those who understand binary, and those who don't). OK so back to language computers communicate in, and language we use to communicate. Now, each computer on the world wide web (WWW) is identified by a unique 32bit number (which can be permanent, also called static IP or temporary, or dynamic IP).

A typical IP address looks like 121.001.003.005.

This representation with 4 decimal numbers (also called octets), are separated by dots and this format is known as "dotted quad" or "dotted decimal" notation.

Now you may ask what has "dotted quad" got to do with domain name? Well imagine if you were to remember and type 72.14.207.99 in the address bar every time you had to do a search? So what is easy to remember the decimal representation or something you are so familiar with, simply known as Google Search?

So back to what is the purpose of a domain name, it is a easy to remember word representation of the unique 32 bit identifier for a machine connected to the internet. Not every machine can serve you web pages though... The machine has to have a software running to churn out web pages, and thus is called a web server.

Just like 32bit unique identifier, each domain name is unique - and maintained by registrars... So if you have not bought a domain name for your business, and someone else is using it, you have missed out the opportunity for your online showroom!!! Your domain name serves as a visiting card for your existing and new customers to display the services rendered by you, your company or the products that you manufacture, or complete information on your office, location, address contact nos. etc... It is only limited by your imagination to use it the way you want it!!!

As I explained how machines talk with each other in binary language of one's and zero's, and how any computer on the world wide web has an IP address, you may wonder how do we associate a domain name with IP address? OK, the answer lies in machines dedicated to perform this translation for you - known as DNS Servers. When a domain name is entered into address bar of a web browser, request goes to a Domain Name System (DNS). The DNS translates the domain name into an IP address then the appropriate site is sought out. All these transactions remain transparent to You the end user; however in the back ground this translation takes place to display web pages from the domain name that you enter in the web browser.

So to summarize why we use a domain name, as you would recollect.
1. Each computer connected on the network is represented by an IP Address.
2. Each IP Address internally is made of "dotted quad".
3. Dotted Quad representation is also known as "dotted decimal".
4. A sample IP address is of the type 111.222.333.444 - a unique 32bit number.
5. Domain name is a simple word(s) representation of IP Address of web server.
6. A web server is a dedicated computer for presenting web pages. [more on this later...]
7. When you type a domain name, like google.com, the request is first sent to a DNS Server.
8. DNS Server translates the word google.com to it's IP address, and thus you don't have to remember IP Address of computers.
9. Domain Name is unique - No 2 sites can have same domain name (just like IP address is unique)
10. Domains are maintained by domain registrars (like my service on pubdomains.com & pubdomains.in)
11. A sample website on amateur radio has IP address (dynamic IP Address, ie, it may change over a period of time) is 209.222.7.10.
12. It is easy to remember domain name instead of IP address.


So .. you may browse a website by its IP Address or its domain name, but as I mentioned, it is easy to remember format, ie words, or string of words, thus a domain name is used all over the internet...

So long,
happy domain'ing

OSCommerce

It has been a successful week. I travelled to the north (once again) on official travel, enjoyed weekend with friends and relatives, and finally came back to work on monday.

And what a week this has been !!! 3 oscommerce installations in 5 days has just took my energy and I am so glad that weekend has finally arrived. If you don't know what oscommerce, or OSC in short is - let me tell you that its a wonderful software, and if you ever want to start your own ONLINE shopping mall ... do have a look at oscommerce stores all around you. I can distinguish between a zen-cart store (another product) and OSC by the look and feel. So if you have unlimited products to be shown ... zen-cart is what majority prefer, but for elegant and decent stores... most of the folks like OSC. A wonderful admin panel, ease of operation and troublefree operation (until your host decide that they had enough of PHP4 and now need to install PHP5 and don't bother to give you advance notice -- I get umpteen hits on one page thanks to these upgrades in PHP or mysql) .

Apart from that I have recently joined DP a must register forum for all webmasters. It is giving me more leads for my business of domain registration and looking for prospective clients for reseller business. Apart from that, there is indeed a lot of confusion in the world about latest ICANN decision to increase domain registration price and a good market place to sell domains. Everyone wants domains @ cheap and affordable cost, and I get a very targetted audience in DP. Do have a look when you get time!!

Wish to continue more ... but as always time to pack and take leave. Wishing everyone a very enjoyable weekend ~~~ OOO ~~~

Back to Business

For all internet freaks - one thing stands out clear for any company is getting a good Domain Name. With over 600 million strong internet users and counting - the demand to get online is increasing everyday!!!!
How can you as an individual join this movement and make money everyday?
Suppose you are a freelancer who
a. Develops sites for others. &
b. Host or manage Sites for others or
c. Develop and maintain your own website(s).
Now questions
Where do you buy domain name?
Where do you host them?
What do you get - if you do it from public service providers?
Do you get commision from them?
Answers
If you & your friends develop and host sites regularly - you should become a reseller!!!
How does it work?
For every domain that is registered on YOUR Domain Registration Site - You get attractive commisions. For every hosting package sold - You share the profits. Why is it good, because - You are the buyer (for someone) and You are the seller !!! so a win win for any and every activity that is related to domain hosting and registration services.
How much does it cost?
Well - GDaddy is worlds largest reseller with plans that start from $99 (Approx INR 4100) that go upto $239 (Approx INR 10000 at current conversion rates) www.pubdomainshost.com offers same services that are available for $80 (INR 3200) to $179 (INR 7200) .
What do you gain?
Well with a single hosting plan and domain name registration - you can make cool commisions from sites hosted on your (reseller) servers.
Support
pubdomainshost.com creates your virtual store - so not only you, but anyone on the internet can come and register or buy from you - do a bit of marketing and get the orders from all over the globe!! They offer 24x7 support to your customers as part of the package, and help your customers to succeed!!! Who would give you these services for price as low as $80!!!
Reseller Fees
Trust me, with a small expenditure of 80 USD on pubdomainshost.com - I have already recovered my investment from a site that I recently created through Rent a Coder. Not only did my customer pay for creating his site for about 150 USD, he hosted it through my site and I got back all my money that I invested. September onwards - any sale I make would be my profits :) Ain't it amazing that I have customers whom I have never seen in my life!!! They come, they buy from my site, and I make profits selling stuff without negotiations, office or even any conversation. It can't get simple than that.
Competition
There are many players in the market so it is natural to think about your chances of success - but on a serious thought, there are so many sellers because there are many more buyers!!!! This is an ever growing space, with names coming up with .mobi, .tv, .ws extensions - everyone has an opportunity to own their own domain name or get online and have a site. Sooner or later - you would be doing it for your company, family, friends or yourself. Why do it at some other place, why don't you do it on your own site and be in a Win Win Situation.
Grab this opportunity to take your share of Internet revolution and be a webmaster - and service provider.

Good luck Friends!!!