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Forgetting to renew domain name can be disastrous for business By James Pilcher / The Cincinnati Enquirer May 24, 2005 - If the Web is your small or home business' front door, losing control of your Internet domain name can be catastrophic. A domain name is the name of a Web site or the part of an e-mail address that comes after the @ sign. It's the part of the Web address (or URL) that comes after the http://www. part. "It's amazing how many businesses don't equate the domain name with the Web site name or their business name," says Aaron Larkins, president of Profitability.net in Cincinnati, which helps companies set up Web sites along with domains and domain names. "It's as much of a brand as anything else. And some people just let it slip away, not knowing how important it is." No statistics are available, but Larkins and other experts in the field say they see a fairly constant stream of businesses letting their domain name registries lapse. That omission, in turn, can lead to breakdowns of their Web sites or their e-mail systems. Just look at some of the names that have had this happen in the past couple of years: -- The Washington Post's e-mail system went down for at least several hours last February when that company did not renew its @washpost.com domain name, although the Web site continued operating normally. -- Online auction site eBay briefly lost control of its German site www.eBay.de last September when hackers apparently got control of its domain name. -- In January, New York-based Internet service provider Panix, host to scores of business Web sites and e-mail systems, lost control of its own domain, with all the Web traffic being directed to a company in Australia and e-mail going to another firm in England. It took more than 24 hours to straighten out the situation. Malice or neglect As in the case of eBay, losing control can be the result of a malicious act. Panix's case is still under investigation -- and foul play is suspected. But in most cases, the loss of name is simply an oversight in sending in the paperwork. Officials at the Post did not respond to at least six warnings of the registry expiration, according to the firms that handle such sign-ups. The twist is that renewing such a registration costs only about $6 a year, and that can include an optional lock that will prevent anyone else from gaining control if the renewal notice happens to "get lost in the mail." (Some companies may charge a little more for service fees.) "Some of the biggest companies out there have forgotten to reregister their domain, including Hotmail," says James Woods, product manager of domain names for Tucows Inc., a Toronto company that specializes in Web infrastructure for Internet service providers, including getting domain names. Woods says the two most common scenarios are when an employee in charge of renewing a domain name leaves the company and no one realizes that the function needs to happen, or "a domestic dispute," when a partner in a business might take the domain and the appropriate user names and passwords with him or her when the business dissolves. Names a commodity Larkins and Woods both say there are plenty of people waiting for such expirations, especially for domains of well-known Web sites. Call it the reverse of cyber-squatting, the practice of registering a domain name or Web site name that could be popular in the future or is the name of a well-known company in advance of someone else getting to it, and then trying to sell the rights. "Domain names have become a real commodity," says Woods. "There are firms out there auctioning off expired domain names that might have gotten some traffic in the past. There is some decent money in it." The actual registration process is done through a firm authorized to do so by several different nonprofit corporations set up to manage the Internet. One of the biggest is the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which oversees registrations for .com and .net domains, among others. This California firm also authorizes new name types, such as the recently introduced .info, .biz., .travel and .jobs suffixes, known as top-level domains, or TLDs. ICANN spokesman Kieran Baker says several safeguards have been put into place in the past two years to help companies avoid losing control of their own sites, even giving firms grace periods. http://www.detnews.com/2005/technology/0505/24/0etec-190852.htm Go Daddy Adds SSL Certificates to Reseller Program The Go Daddy Group, Inc., announced today that they are now offering SSL (Secure Socket Layer) Certificates to resellers through Wild West Domains, Inc., the Company's reseller program. Through WWD's turnkey program, resellers can instantly promote and sell 128-bit encryption SSL certificates (the strongest encryption available on the market today for web server certificates) from their web sites. "SSL certificates provide serious competitive advantages to online businesses by assuring consumers that their private and personal information is being encrypted during transmission," states Bob Parsons, president and founder of The Go Daddy Group. "We are one of a select few Certificate Authorities in the world who own our trusted root certificate and can therefore sell web server certificates. Through WWD, our resellers now have the opportunity offer their customers the most affordable, robust security certificates available." Before issuing any certificate, Go Daddy's Registration Authority performs a rigorous authentication that includes an automated application process followed-up by manual verification with corroboration through third party databases such as D & B. Since the authentication work is processed by the Registration Authority, WWD resellers can provide reassurance to their online purchasers that websites which display a SSL certificate purchased from them has been subjected to reasonable validation to determine its authenticity. SSL certificates are processed and delivered within a matter of hours to customer's sites. Compatible with 99 percent of the Web browsers on the market, WWD resellers can market certificates from $49.95 per year. Other companies charge as much as $895 per year for a similar product. "Enterprises, web hosting companies, even security resellers can now increase sales by offering their online business customers a simple and cost-effective way to grow their own sales by showcasing SSL certificate, demonstrating that they care about consumers' information and peace of mind," says Parsons. About The Go Daddy Group, Inc. For more information, please visit: www.godaddy.com About Wild West Domain, Inc. Founded in December 2001, Wild West Domains, Inc., is an ICANN accredited registrar and all-inclusive reseller provider. As a part of The Go Daddy Group, Inc. family of companies, Wild West Domains offers an array of competitively priced products and services to facilitate entry into the high-growth reseller market for such Internet professional as ISPs, hosting firms, Web designers and developers, Internet entrepreneurs and system integrators. For more information, please visit: www.wildwestdomains.com |
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