I was reading few posts and was surprised to note that couple of leading domain registrars have been "accused" of usurping domain names after you search for a domain name on their site. Network Solution has been prime accused with multiple folks having reported the issue.
I have never ever come across such an instance with my domain purchase history so far, and yes, my first domain was purchased from Network Solutions in the beginning of year 2000, so if the ethics have changed over a period of 8 years, or if booming domain name price is reason enough for a company to indulge in malpractices like these is a serious issue.
Have you ever noticed something like this? Have you ever been victim of such usurping by domain registrar? Please share your experience and let the world know who to stay away from... Do us a favour and inform the netizens!!!
Pubdomains.com -- Domain Registrar, Web Host & SSL Certificates Seller
Showing posts with label domain name. Show all posts
Showing posts with label domain name. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Monday, June 16, 2008
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.
Pubdomains.com -- Domain Name Registrar, Web Host and SSL Certificate provider. Expert in OSCommerce setup, modifications and troubleshooting. Free Hosting and other web services.
Domain Registration * Web Hosting * SSL Certificates * Blogs Hosting * Forum Hosting * .IN Domain Registrar * Web Hosting Indian Servers * Reseller Business Opportunities
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.
Pubdomains.com -- Domain Name Registrar, Web Host and SSL Certificate provider. Expert in OSCommerce setup, modifications and troubleshooting. Free Hosting and other web services.
Domain Registration * Web Hosting * SSL Certificates * Blogs Hosting * Forum Hosting * .IN Domain Registrar * Web Hosting Indian Servers * Reseller Business Opportunities
Monday, January 7, 2008
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!!!
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!!!
Thursday, January 3, 2008
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 :)
Webmaster
[pubdomains.in | pubdomains.com | pubwebhost.com | finehost.in | pubdomainshost.com | pubdomainshost.in]
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 :)
Webmaster
[pubdomains.in | pubdomains.com | pubwebhost.com | finehost.in | pubdomainshost.com | pubdomainshost.in]
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