Posts tagged domains

New ICANN Internet Extensions?

Tech

So the freaking “we rule the web” ICANN has decided to start launching custom TLD, encase you dont know what i mean, its simple, ICANN is the organization in charge of regulating the domain name space (like  most of the domains in the internet, .com .net ….), and they decided that anyone with money can have their very own .horny or .smartypants, so we can have a im.horny … gawd that beautiful!

So why do i think this another ICANN farce!

ICANN is a Bullshit Organization – When you sell the .com and .net business to Verisign without any kind of oversight, that says everything, ICANN is a business not a organization, they dont care about the internet, they care about their bottom line, the real cost of a domain registration is negligible, its cents, but they charge everyone 10$ for any domain!

Custom TLD’s are a basic Shake-Down – The same way when new TLDs launch or new TLDs are de-regulated there is always a landgrab from thousands of companies that simply want to protect their brand/identity by having every single domain, so any new TLD will always have a couple of thousands sales guaranteed.

The are already vanity TLDs – Opennic has .geek, .free, .bbs, .parody, .oss, .indy, .fur, .ing, .micro, .dyn, .neo for free? yeah fucking free! why? cause it doesnt cost anything to add a TLD despite what ICANN keeps saying! Go to your hosts file on the computer and change google.com to 127.0.0.1 and sudenly when your write google.com on your browser you get nothing (cause you are bypassing your DNS and telling your computer that google.com is in your computer instead of the web) thats what DNS is! poiting a number to a name, that is ALL.

There are pleanty of TLD’s already – Yes and un-used, there is plenty to choose (.info .us .eu .me .biz .xxx .asia .mobi …. besides all the country domains), adding more will just make everything even more confusing, whats the point? how will it help any internet user? it wont, nowadays we are already getting stuck on the… its confusing.com? nooo its confusing.org or maybe confusing.de, cant remember the site, but with these TLD’s you will have such gems as .lol or .youtube … so its www.youtube.com or www.youtube what? where?

What am i supossed to do with this – Cause only rich people and corporations can get their very own TLD’s what is everyone supposed to do about it? Go and buy domains under these idiotic TLD’s? Fuck that shit…

Domain Registrar Reviews and Comparison

Reviews 2 Comments

Well domains are an essential part of what makes the internet useful and easy to use, we really don’t need them, but our minds are generally not made to memorize big numbers like 145.234.211.841 (this is a ipv4 internet address, in the future with the introduction of ipv6 the numbers will be stranger and larger hehehe) so something like hostcult.com is way more simple to use and memorize (well secretly i wished icann would have made them even more simple, like just typing hostcult on the browser or hostcult.c).

Also brands wouldn’t be able to use the internet so well if, like if microsoft was 6427-7-38 (american phone keypad combination) instead of microsoft.com, so it makes sense to use domains, as the years gone by, i have used a series of different domain registrars to register all my domains, so here is a small resume of the domains registrars i use today and some of the ones i used (no point talking about registars that no longer exist, or that are not relevant today):

Godaddy
When: couple of years ago, about 10 domains.
Pros: pretty cheap at the time, still cheap today with coupons, pretty good feature set.
Cons: renewal fees are expensive, icann fees are billed separately (they always bill that as an extra while most domain hosts bill it as part of the overall price), confusing control panel, they keep offering/pushing their other services, they will cancel/suspend your domain at the slightest problem or dmca.


eNom
When: couple of years ago, about 5 domains.
Pros: cheap reseller, awesome control panel, pretty good pricing, reliable registrar, awesome support.
Cons: at the time, it was complicated to buy and put money inside of the account (you had to have money on your enom account so you could buy domains), also they weren’t the cheapest (even though now, they are one of the cheapest).


Onlinenic
When: couple of years ago, about 30 domains.
Pros: cheap reseller, average feature set.
Cons: convoluted payment system, lots of downtime, unreliable, horrible support, horrible control panel.


Namecheap
When: couple of years ago, about 5 domains.
Pros: large feature set, good control panel, good support, probably my recommendation if you have/want just a couple of domains, they are/were a enom reseller, so its a good platform anyways.
Cons: a bit pricey, still renewals are normally the same price as registration, so no hidden fees.


Domainsite
When: couple of years ago, about 5 domains.
Pros: simple and quick control panel, average pricing (even though i bought at the time with discount), interesting feature set, with unusual services, horrible support service.
Cons: renewals are way more expensive.


Moniker
When: couple of years ago, about 10 domains there.
Pros: cheap reseller, the best bulk registration i have ever seen, average feature set and control panel.
Cons: at the time it was being sold off or not, kinda weird things going on, so i moved on as a precaution, also because pricing is kinda average.


ResellerClub
When: today, around 150 domains there.
Pros: cheap reseller (the more you pay, the cheaper the price, because i pay a lot i have a pretty good pricing), reliable, average feature set and control panel, still they have been adding new stuff with time.
Cons: no automatic renewal system, every other month there are problems with they credit card processing company “transecute” (that i think they own or at least are very buddy with), support is average but normally takes a lot of time to get back to you


InternetBS
When: today, around 5 domains there.
Pros: cheap registrar, average feature set, average control panel, i tend to buy domains here if they are cheaper than on resellerclub and then transfer them over or not to resellercub.
Cons: none so far.

Notes:

  1. I buy a lot of domains, so my main concern is the price, features are not that important, since most of these can be had with a server to run the domains, so these registrars might be good for you or not.
  2. Also i have a couple of free domains from webhosts i still use, but i don’t recommend that, you want to keep your domains separate from your host for all the good reasons.
  3. I do have domains on other registrars, mostly domains that aren’t offered worldwide or that involve a lot of bureaucracy that some local registrars can deal better, like .pt/.de/.co.uk domains.
  4. Like i said some of these registrars i haven’t deal with in years, so they might have gotten better or not, take my “reviews” with a grain of salt.
  5. Cant believe i put Godday first!!!! seems their insane promotion and publicity is starting to work on me… well… NAAAAA heheheh

List of Fast Free DNS Servers

Tech

DNS (Domain Name System) Server is used to lookout domain names to ip address, it has more purposes, but for the most part thats their function, public DNS providers are free to use DNS servers that provide that function to anyone that needs it.

So since you are online the DNS service was probably provided by you ISP as part of their system to get you online, so why would you like to change your DNS provider from your ISP to a public one?

The main reasons, in degree of importance, in my view are:

1) Security, your ISP probably uses standard off-the-shelf dns software, also DNS although important is not a priority, security tend to suffer first, especially when new tricks and flaws are found, things like dns cache poisoning (injecting dns records that are not from a authoritative dns server), also phishing or malware or other kinds of security risks can be averted by using a stronger more secure dns provider.
2) Performance, every single time you put a new domain name, that name has to be resolved on a dns server for the domain to show up, that means performance is essential, especially comparing to your ISP dns server that is extremely close to you.
3) Control and Customise, the ability to take control of your dns, of using it to make your browsing faster or check it domains are there, if you mistyped, if there is malware on the page you want to visit, or blocking kids from accessing certain kinds of sites.


So the list here follows a different pattern since im going to check the speed of it (from 3 different locations) as well as my personal preference depending on features and overall performance:

1) Google Public DNS (Like: Speed and Standards / Dislike: None)

  • 8.8.8.8
  • 8.8.4.4

2) OpenDNS (Like: Speed and Security / Dislike: DNS Hijacking)

  • 208.67.222.222
  • 208.67.220.220
  • 208.67.222.220
  • 208.67.220.222

5) Level 3 (Like: Speed and Standards / Dislike: None)

  • 4.2.2.1
  • 4.2.2.2
  • 4.2.2.3
  • 4.2.2.4
  • 4.2.2.5
  • 4.2.2.6

4) Comodo Secure DNS (Like: Security / Dislike: None)

  • 156.154.70.22
  • 156.154.71.22

Notes:
1) the checks were made from California (USA), London (UK) and Faro (Portugal) using namebench http://code.google.com/p/namebench/.
2) i could have made a huge list, but i prefer to provide the cleanest most objective one, than a random copy paste list, so i removed lots of other good public dns providers, just cause at the time they were giving me errors and not performing normally, like scrubit dns, cisco or norton safe dns.
3) opendns would have won (just about the same performance as google public dns), but i personally prefer a dns that gives an error when it fails and doesn’t hijack or disrupt sessions by pushing their search when a server is having a glitch or dns issues, but that’s just me.