Tag: web

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Bogus Domain Name Expiration Notices

As a owner of several websites, I regularly get misleading domain expiration notices from companies that are not my domain registrar.

Sometimes the notices are about domains that really are expiring soon. Today, I got a notice of expiration notice from a place called domainregisstra.com from verranhaddad@sellstones.com. While the email never stated the expiration of the domain, it implied one by stating a “due date” of May 13, 2011. The email text stated:

Attn :

This solicitation is to inform you that it’s time to send in your registration for [mywebsite.com]. DRS is a submission service and search engine ranking provider.

Failure to complete your search engine registration by May 13, 2011 may result in the cancellation of this offer (making it difficult for your customers to locate you using search engines on the web).

Your registration includes search engine submission for [mywebsite.com] for 1 year. You are under no obligation to pay the amount stated above unless you accept this offer by May 13, 2011. This notice is not an invoice. It is a courtesy reminder to register [mywebsite.com] for search engine listing so that your customers can locate you on the web.

So I looked up my domain at whois.com and found out the real expiration date of April 20, 2015.

The main scam here is that this looks like a renewal notice from my registar. But it’s from a company that wants to move me to a different registrar. If I was going to renew my domain, I’d just go to my real registar.

The price quoted from this email is $75 per year. That’s a scam considering that places like hover.com and godaddy offer domain registrations for $5 to $15 per year. The only claimed extra value is a “search engine submission”, which is really a worthless service. If your site is brand new and no search engine knows about it you can submit it to Google and submit it to Bing for free.

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Synchronize your browser bookmarks

One of the most useful pieces of software for anyone with more than one computer is Foxmarks. Foxmarks is a free plug-in for the Firefox browser that seamlessly synchronizes your Firefox bookmarks and bookmark folders on any computer and any operating system that you are running it on.

This makes your bookmarks all the more valuable. You can find a new site from your home computer, bookmark it, and then see it in your work computer’s bookmarks. Foxmarks will encourage you to organize and better use your bookmarks.

With more and more software moving to the web, bookmark organization is important. Foxmarks makes that easy for all your computers.

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Online Real Estate Tools in Washington D.C. Area

Whether you’re buying, selling, or just want to know what’s going on, it’s easier than ever to follow real estate online.

Finding Comparables

Zillow provides a property value estimate based on neighboring comparables and their sale prices. It was started in 2005 by the people who started Expedia.com because they were frustrated that these tools were only available to real estate agents.

Real Estate Listings

Google recently added Real Estate to their Maps option. Google Base also recently began listing Real Estate with full search capabilities.

Long and Foster has been one of the most popular sites to search MLS listed properties.

Credit Report

Before buying a house, you need to know your credit score. You should also check it occasionally just to be sure that there are no errors. It is not uncommon to find that someone has impersonated you or that the credit agency just got something wrong.

AnnualCreditReport.com allows you to request your credit report for free once every 12 months from each of the nationwide consumer credit reporting companies: Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.

Mortages

Bankrate.com provides a good starting point for finding mortgage rates.

If you are in the Military or part of a Military family, consider Pentagon Federal Credit Union or the Navy Federal Credit Union. There are local offices in Washington D.C., Virginia, and Maryland.

Realtors

If you understand the comparables and have done the search yourself, you should consider a low-cost realtor.

Both ZipRealty and PenFed Realty (for Military personnel) both offer low fees or cash back.

Real Estate News

The Washington Post – Real Estate section provides real estate news and stories in D.C., Virginia, and Maryland.

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Mosso Cloud Computing

Mosso is a very ambitious web hosting solution designed to be infinitely scalable. It accomplishes this by clustering together as many servers as they need to handle their load.  For just $100/month, you get 50GB of storage and 500GB of bandwidth for as many sites as you want.  You can use some of the most popular web development technologies such as PHP, Ruby, Perl, Python, .NET, ASP, MySQL, and MS SQL 2005.  Because this is a clustered environment, you lose a few of the pleasantries that a dedicated server gives you such as shell access and root access to the server allowing you to run any processes.  On the other hand, you gain scalability and you don’t have to worry about managing your server.  If Mosso goes down, everyone notices so they address it as soon as possible.  The biggest problem is that it does seem to go down.

Mosso appears to be targeting less mission critical websites such as blogs that can afford to have a little downtime every now and then.  It is slower as far as web pages loading than using a dedicated server but on the other hand, if you grow in visitors, the speed will be the same whereas on a dedicated server, with increased visitors, your server may become overwhelmed.  For non-essential websites, Mosso appears to be a very nice hosting choice.

The most impressive aspect of Mosso is all the technologies they try to support.  Google has a very similar service called Google App Engine.  It only supports python though so it is very limited.  It can’t even support SSL certificates like Mosso can.  Amazon also has a cloud solution called EC2 but it is really only for tech experts.  It does not scale automatically by default like Mosso.  Instead, you have to turn on more servers as you need them.  You can program your Amazon servers to do this themselves but that’s part of why this is expert only.

It looks like we’re headed towards more scalable hosting solutions for the future.  Managing your own dedicated server is both difficult and time consuming. Mosso needs to work on their reliability and uptime but I think they are a company to watch since they seem further ahead than others when it comes to cloud computing.

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Problems for Pandora and other US Web Radio Stations

Pandora is a web site that provides streaming music to your computer, your iPhone, and other devices. It creates customized stations based on music you like and if you give a song a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”. You can click on a song you like to go to Amazon or iTunes in order to purchase it. It’s great for finding new music and it used to be a good business.

But the record companies are afraid of streaming radio stations. They brought the issue to the Copyright Royalty Board, which decided last year to raise the cost to play a song over the Internet from 8/100 of a cent per song per listener in 2006 to 19/100 of a cent per song per listener in 2010. Pandora only makes revenue on ads on its website, so this will be quite a bite into profits.

The Washington Post recently talked with Pandora.

“We’re approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision,” said Tim Westergren, who founded Pandora. “This is like a last stand for webcasting.”…

“We’re losing money as it is… The moment we think this problem in Washington is not going to get solved, we have to pull the plug because all we’re doing is wasting money.”

The problem is in Washington with the Copyright Royalty Board’s decision. First, if the music industry understood what was in their best interests, they would encourage the promotion of their music. Second, these rules only apply to the US. So I can still listen to streaming radio coming from Canada or anywhere else. Only US-based sites are punished. Third, no fees are charged to traditional over-the-air radio stations to play music.

Rep. Howard L. Berman of California is trying to negotiate a deal between web radio companies and SoundExchange, which represents the record companies. Hopefully he can encourage a more reasonable approach to music over the Internet.