Simon Dice

Just whose domain is it?

stwsim — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 02:44:45 +0000

This is something I posted in another blog a couple of years ago, but the issue continues to come up, so I thought it was worth re-posting.

Starting with the end: If you’ve got a domain name (ex. www.mycompany.com), make sure you’re listed on the contact record – most certainly as the registrant, ideally as one of the other contacts as well.

Again and again and again, I keep running into this: A client asks us to manage their domain, either for hosting (www.stwhosting.com), to transfer to our iclaro website service (www.iclaro.com), or for other reasons.

To do this, minimally we need to update the name servers associated with their name registration so that they point to the new website location.

Generally speaking, the client will have no idea about where their name is registered or what the id and password are to access it.

We can look this up, and generally, provided the client has been included as a contact for the domain, we can initiate a password request, which will send the client their user id and password.

Nine times out of ten though I find that the domain is registered entirely in the name of the person who first set it up: likely a long-gone web designer, hosting company, or someone else!

A name registration record has four contact fields – the registrant name (which should be the name of the company or person using the domain), an admin contact, technical contact, and billing contact.

Minimially, the registrant field should be the name of the owner, and we usually suggest the admin contact as well.

If that former person decides to be awkward (which happens quite often) it can be difficult to get control of the domain – not impossible, so far we’ve been successful every time – but a pain. [update: we’ve been unable to gain control of .ca domains. We communicated with CIRA, the Canadian registration authority, and the response is that we either need to get the person in who’s name the domain is to turn it over, register an alternate name, or begin a legal dispute process – a not inexpensive process).

Example:

I want a website – www.mywidgets.com

I hire Bob Smith to design it and look after all of that for me. He does, but in the process registers www.mywidgets.com in his name. As long as we have a relationship, everything is fine.

But what if the relationship falls apart, or Bob disappears, or moves on to something else? If I want to move my website to another company I have to go through Bob to do so. If the relationship is bad, Bob can make that difficult, costly, or time consuming.

The bottom line – if you’ve got a domain name, make sure you’re listed on the contact record – most certainly as the registrant, ideally as one of the other contacts as well.

One more thing – Just how much are you paying for your domain name? The most recent client we helped was paying $60 per year for her domain name. We charge $19.99 (.com or .ca) and make a profit (not huge, but a couple of bucks). We charge even less for self serve (.com at www.stwtools.com, .ca through namespro.ca).

Simon

Nexus Fine Foods in Brampton

stwsim — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:04:31 +0000

My wife and I had dinner last week at Nexus Fine Foods in downtown Brampton. It’s a new place, not open to the public yet (at least as of last week), being opened by a long-time client of ours as part of a new venture.

We’ll be developing the website and were invited to take part in a “vendor meal”.

I’m not terribly familiar with Brampton, but the restaurant seems to be located right in the heart of downtown Bramption, with a couple of theatres right across the road.

Formerly a Greek restaurant, the space has gone through some significant, and rather lovely redecorating, and while it wasn’t quite finished yet, the place is looking good. New walls, new floors, new seats, new bathrooms – all the things you need to turn a greek restaurant into a fine dining establishment – and there is a place for a grand piano (I understand there will be live music on weekends), and a beautiful 200+ gallon saltwater aquarium, with an assortment of brightly coloured fish swimming about (I inquired - they’re not on the menu).

A cool part of the evening was watching them feed a huge black & white striped eel. Previously we’d only seen a head hiding in the rocks, but when the food came out so did he, all 2 – 3 feet of him.

Dinner was nice. We had a cheese/phylo pastry thingy as an appetizer (light and appetizing), a nice salad, and then a decent sized steak. Desert was a rich chocolaty thing that was almost too chocolately for me.

They had 6 beer taps, 3 of which were active, serving Oakville’s own Cameron beers. I managed a glass or two of the Cream Ale, the Auburn Ale, and the Dark, all very nice, with the Auburn Ale having a surprising amount of flavour (one fellow at my table described it as “robust”) – it reminded me of some of the beers we used to brew at Select Brewing back in university days.

Anyway, when they’re open, I’d recommend checking them out. With the theatres across the road it should make for a nice evening.

Simon

Holy spam!

stwsim — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 19:28:46 +0000

So recently I reworked our spam filtering in the office. About one month ago we put a Microsoft Small Business Server which has Exchange Mail server, so rather then mail travelling through our web host it now comes directly to the office.

Previously, when the mail went through the web host all the message tagged as spam were deleted before they got to my mailbox. Now with the Exchange filtering they are coming to my mailbox, but automatically going into my junk mail folder. We’ve got the filters set quite well, and only very few spam messages are actually ending up in my inbox.

So here it is. About 2 weeks ago I cleared out the junk mail folder. Since midnight on August 9th, until now, 3pm on August 22nd my junk mail folder has received: 7620 emails. Thats a lot of junk. Lets see, thats 7620 messages divided by about 303 hours, thats about 25 / hour, or about 1 piece of junk every 2.4 minutes.

Thank god for spam filters, there would be a heck of a lot of wasted time without them.

So here’s the thing, among those 7600+ emails, I’ve found 2 valid messages. Thats not bad I suppose, about 1 in 3500 – 1 per week .. but what if one of those emails was “the big job”. It sure would be nice to autodump the spam, but I guess I can’t. Bastards.

Email has been called “the killer app” .. that is its the application that no one can live without. Without spam filters, it would be the “the killed app”. Having to check hundreds of junk message every day for the odd misfiltered email is a p in the a.

screen cap of my junk mail folder showing 7620 pieces of junk mail received in under 2 weeks.

If you email, and I don’t reply, try giving me a call.

… since I started this entry, 6 more pieces of spam have come in.