A bunch of years ago I had an idea for an espionage/action/thriller story where a bunch of mercenaries planned a coup d'etat against the regimes of either Columbia or Cameroon for the sole reason of gaining control over the country's top-level domain registry and making billions off of typo-squatting .COM.

Truth did kind of mimic fiction (minus the coup d'etat part) when Kevin Ham cut a deal with Cameroon to wildcard .CM root. Well now Columbia has decided to overhaul it's .CO root level domain and open it up to second level registations for non-locals.

.CO is being marketed ostensibly as 'Associated globally with the words "COmpany," "COrporation" and "COmmerce"', but let's face it, the activity in this TLD is going to be driven primarily by the fact that it's a typosquatter's wet dream for .COM and a goddamn headache for everybody else with a net presence built mainly under .COM.

As we've observed before (here and then here), most registrars like to whip their customer base into a frenzy to "grab your name" under every TLD that tries to tart itself up as some pseudo-generic and trots itself out as the latest "must-have" domain. Most of them aren't "must-haves" and a lot of them are quite frankly, a waste of time and money.

So it is with a heavy heart I have to come out and say this. If you're operating a serious net presence on .COM, you probably should go out and get the .CO version of your name, as much of a royal pain in the ass as that is/will be. Not to mention expensive. The base cost on a non-Columbian Sunrise claim will be somewhere north of $250 (non-refundable) and for landrush there will be a small non-refundable "application fee" but the first year registration will be over $200. Then after landrush, the cost will settle down to a more digestible level, only about 3 times the wholesale base cost of an actual .COM.

Nice work if you can get it.

We don't want to make a bad situation worse, but we won't work for free either, so we'll try to keep our markup reasonable.

What I am interested in is what our members think of this. If you have a few moments, please take the following survey on whether you will participate in .CO. For each response we'll donate $1 to the charity of your choice.

Feel free to comment as well.



Continue reading ".CO Domain Registrations are Coming. Will You Participate?"

For members who want an advance preview into the new system, what follows are step-by-step instructions on how to move a domain from the current easyDNS interface to the new management platform.

The new platform has been live since mid-2009, many of the staff here have been running their personal domains off of here and we've had numerous beta users on board as well. Additionally, I've been running one of my personal email accounts through the new easyMAIL platform since last summer, and I felt confident enough to switch my mom's email to it a few weeks ago.

There are few things we are still smoothing out and filling in like some of the help docs and some of the new features.

But here it is, the shape of things to come for easyDNS.

Until you get the hang of the new platform, we strongly suggest that you start with a non-critical domain. Something that won't ruin your life if the unexpected happens.

There is also this introductory document which outlines the new features and what changes on the new platform. It is strongly recommended that you review that document first.

So without further adieu, here's how to move a domain to the new system....
Continue reading "How to Port a Domain to the new easyDNS User Interface"

We are pushing back the launch of the new website and user interface until April 12, for a few reasons - not the least of which is that we will be shorthanded through the month of March on a few fronts. (March break, time off with the kids, Confoo, etc).

What we will do next week is post instructions on how to start trying out the new platform in advance and begin talking about what's new under the new system.

This morning I had just dropped my daughter off at school when an ad came on CBC radio as I was headed to my workout, the gist of it was:

More and more consumers are headed online as the first step in their next purchase. Is your business positioned to cash in on this trend?

It sounded a little 1998-ish to me, but what really got me was the URL. These ads were from some online internet marketing company here in Toronto and the URL was......


Continue reading "Useless URLs, Episode 2: Internet Marketing Experts in Toronto"

I've fielded a handful of queries from members about the coming DNS usage quotas. Some have looked at the "query usage" links beside their domain names and are surprised at the numbers they are seeing.

One thing to be aware of is that we've discovered that the January numbers were tabulated incorrectly and are too high. To gain a truer insight into your usage, look at the January 28th figure. We are currently running a process to fix up the stats to reflect actual usage and expect to have those online within the next couple of days.

But I'd like to take an opportunity to convey the following principles behind this to our member base:



Continue reading "DNS usage quotas: before you panic"

We will soon be launching our new member interface, a ground up rewrite of the current members.easydns.com website. It has been a long time in coming, like all complex projects, it always goes over-budget and takes longer than expected.

The current user interface works, but it's pretty stale. There are so many layers of upgrades, fixes and plugins underneath the UI you see when you log in, that it's hit the point of diminishing returns: every time we add a feature or commit a bugfix, it seems to break something else. Despite the fact that most people dislike change, especially user interface changes, it is time to move on to the next level for easyDNS.



Continue reading "Big Changes Coming to easyDNS"

We are re-assigning the IP addresses for remote1.easydns.com and
remote2.easydns.com. The changes will be as follows;

WAS
remote1.easydns.com 216.246.59.66
remote2.easydns.com 209.200.141.4

IS NOW
remote1.easydns.com 205.234.220.154
remote2.easydns.com 209.200.187.4

This will not impact name service resolution, although if you are a secondary customer and are using a DNS server that can not accept netblock assignments into the ACL (MS DNS servers) you will have to change your configuration to reflect this move.

Our offices will be open for telephone support:

Thursday December 24th, 8:30AM - 3:00PM
Friday December 25th, closed
Saturday December 26th, closed
Sunday December 27th, 12:00AM - 6:00PM
Monday December 28th, 10:00AM - 6:00PM
Thursday December 31st, 8:30AM - 3:00PM
Friday January 1st, closed.


thank you
easyDNS

Telephone support will be unavailable on Saturday December 12th, 2009 and will resume Sunday December 13th, 2009. Email support at support@easydns.com and billing@easydns.com will still be available.

We do apologise for the inconvenience.

thank you
easyDNS

Just over an hour ago, the co-location facility we use in Amsterdam suffered a brief power outage, which resulted in two of our nameservers being unexpectedly restarted:

ams1.easydns.com (part of the "ns1.easydns.com" Anycast cluster)
ns6.easydns.net

Our sysAdmins took "ams1.easydns.com" out of the "ns1.easydns.com" Anycast cluster as soon as this occurred, which means that "ns1.easydns.com" was not affected at all. However, as "ns6.easydns.net" is currently a stand-alone nameserver, our sysAdmins focused on bring this server up as quickly as possible.

At this time, "ns6.easydns.net" is operational again and responding to queries, and we will work with our co-location provider to determine the cause of this outage.

We apologise for any inconvenience.

The other day I stumbled across http://appsto.re, a DNS client domain which is a pretty useful specialized URL shortener for iPhone apps.

A good example is easyDNS' own iPhone app for easyWhois. The iTunes URL is loooooooooooooong and cumbersome, and to be honest, I can't readily remember what shortened URL I created for it on easyURL (I think maybe http://easyurl.net/easyiphone?)

Well with appsto.re, we know it's simply http://appsto.re/easyWhois, and you can view the info for any given app by using http://appsto.re/info/easyWhois.

You can even create your own custom shortened URLs for any given iPhone app.

The other interesting thing about appsto.re that distinguishes it from most of the other URL shorteners out there, is that it actually has a revenue model, since I imagine they can use affiliate links to redirect to the paid apps (sorry guys, our app is free).

We've changed the glue record in the roots for ns3.easydns.org to reference a different node while we debug the data syncing issue.

Some queries are still coming in owing to DNS cache issues. If you recently updated your zone and that update has not been reflected in ns3.easydns.org then you could also consider removing ns3.easydns.org from your DNS delegation.

ns3 is a stand-alone node (we will be phasing out the stand-alone noded in the new year), as long as you have the ns1 and ns2 anycast strands in your delegation, you can safely remove ns3 from the delegation.

We're experiencing issues with this machine updating zone info.
We are working to resolve this issue and will post further info as it becomes available.

NS3 may become unresponsive for a brief period as we restart all DNS services on this machine.

At this time, telephone support is not available.

For support or billing inquiries, please email us:

support@easydns.com

billing@easydns.com

Thank you,

The easyDNS Support Team