Back in the middle of July, I wrote a GEEKNOTE titled “Domain Registrations” about the hazards of incorrectly registering a domain name.

I described a specific instance we were dealing with for a company who had their domain name transferred into a personal account with Network Solutions.  We finally got control of the domain for our client.  It wasn’t easy.  Faced with the prospect of either having to go to court or find the person who most recently controlled the domain, but had moved somewhere out west with no forwarding address, we decided to get creative.  Even so it took nearly eight weeks and required us to do the following:

• We contacted the current owner of the now defunct domain used for the email address used for the domain account owner with Network Solutions and paid them to temporarily point the defunct domain’s MX record  at one of our mail servers.
• We went through the lost password process with Network Solutions and then changed the Administrative contact’s email address to a valid one.
• We then waited 30 days for Network Solutions to unlock the customer’s domain.
• We initiated a domain transfer to another registrar, changing the registration into our client’s corporate name in the process.
• We waited a week while Network Solutions first took several days to send us a valid transfer code and then several more days before Network Solutions finally approved the transfer.

Hours of work and hundreds of dollars in expense, just to fix a problem that shouldn’t have happened in the first place.  Company domain names should NEVER be registered in the name of an individual.  Had the domain been registered with Network Solutions as a company registration, a simple faxed letter to change the contact would have been all that was necessary.

Maybe it is just because I have twenty years of experience registering and managing domain names, but it really doesn’t seem to me that it should be this difficult to do things right in the first place.

Want to register a domain name and do it right?  Feel free to give me a shout.

 

 

GEEKNOTE:   Domain names are your identity on the Internet.  They are “nice to have” for individuals, but critical for businesses.  You simply won’t be taken seriously as a business if you are using a free email account with a “generic” domain name like gmail.com, etc.

While, your company should have its own domain name,  there seem to be an almost infinite number of ways of screwing up the process.

One company I know lost their domain name after they ignored the renewal notices and a foreign company swooped in and grabbed the domain right after it expired.  Mercifully, this is more difficult to do now as there is a “redemption period” after the domain expires before someone else can grab it.

The reason that they ignored the valid notice is because there are a number of companies that send out solicitations that look like domain renewal notices and they didn’t want to fall into the trap of paying the wrong company.  You have to know how to tell the difference between a valid renewal notice and a scam.

Another company had issues with their website and the person handling their web work, so they went out and bought a new domain.  This failed on three levels:  They had to trash everything they had with the old domain name, they picked a new domain with a “.CO” (Columbia, South America) extension, and another business in town had the exact same domain name, except with a “.COM” extension, potentially creating confusion between the two.

Yet another company chose a domain registrar in Vancouver, who essentially held  their domain for ransom when they tried to transfer the domain to a US host.  We’ve also seen folks use a registrar in Australia, with a 12 hour time zone difference to deal with when you want to talk to someone.  Having your domain registered through a foreign country is never a good idea.

Most recently, we’ve been trying to assist a company that we had helped register a domain name a dozen years ago.  They got their own internal IT person and took over management of their domain five or six years ago.  The IT person transferred the company’s domain into a PERSONAL account at Network Solutions and then, when the IT person changed, the new one changed the name of the account holder at Network Solutions, but not the contact email address.  The second IT person left the company early this year and moved to parts unknown out west.  I’m still listed as the technical contact for the domain, so I got the call when things broke.  The email address on file with Network Solutions for the account holder is no longer valid.  Because the domain is now registered as a “personal” domain, the company is faced with three options:

1. Get the missing account holder to tell Network Solutions that it is okay to transfer the domain or produce a death certificate for the account holder.
2. Get a court order directing Network Solutions to release the domain to them.
3. Buy a new domain and just abandon the domain they have had for a dozen years.

Mind you, the domain name is composed of the initials of the company and, if you go to the website, it clearly belongs to the company.  As much as the company staff would now like to assist in qualifying the MIA account holder for a death certificate, I suspect cooler heads will prevail and they will seek a court order.

There are a number of reasons I avoid using Network Solutions, and this could well be “Exhibit A”.  It is simply impossible to find anyone there with a lick of common sense.  Network Solution’s status as the largest registrar in the world simply makes them more bureaucratic.

Business domains should be registered in the name of the business.  If the administrative contact dies or otherwise becomes unavailable, it is a fairly simple process to fax the registrar a change of contact form and get a new person assigned as the contact.  The registrar we use doesn’t distinguish between types of owners.  There are registration fields sufficient to cover both individuals registering a domain name as well as companies doing so.

If you aren’t familiar with the ins and outs of domain registrations, pick someone who is and let them handle the domain registration for you.    This can be your IT company,  your web hosting company, or whoever handles your email.  One benefit of having an outsider handle this for you is that, if something bad happens to your domain (eg. Your Exchange Server dies and you need to make changes to where your email is going), the person charged with fixing the problem has an email address in a different domain that is unaffected by the outage.

It is also important to have multiple people able to deal with a crisis situation.  We handle something on the order of 150 domains for our customers and they can rest easy knowing that if I get hit by a truck, my partner can make one phone call direct  to the president of the organization we do our registrations through and get things updated.

We also bill our customers for the renewals so they know that they can safely ignore any domain registration “bills” that come from anyone else.

It simply doesn’t have to be as complicated as Network Solutions and some of the other registrars want to make it.

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Contact us if you would like a review of your current domain registration or assistance registering a domain name for your company.

GEEKNOTE:  A little over three months ago, I reported on Intel’s “Next Unit of Computing” or “NUC”.  We now have our hands on all three processor versions….the Celeron, the i3, and the i5 versions.

We’ve run the Windows Experience Ratings for each of them, plus three conventional workstations as reference systems.

The 1.1ghz Celeron NUC came in dead last in processor performance, scoring a 3.9.  My six year old Quad core system at home came in second at 5.9.  Mid pack were an older 2.8ghz E5500 desktop and the i3 version of the NUC at 6.2.  The 1.8ghz i5 NUC came in a little better at 6.9, just a tad below the 7.1 of a 3.1ghz i3-2100 and my screaming i5 quad core (less than a year old)  at work.  What is interesting to me is the fact that the clock speed doesn’t mean that much anymore.  The newer systems tend to run faster than the older ones, even those with faster clock speeds or more processor cores.

Graphics performance is even more interesting.  The Celeron NUC out performs all of the conventional desktops except my i5 quad core at the office, and my quad core at the office can’t keep up with either the i3 or i5 versions of the NUC when it comes to graphics.  Again, this is an example of the newer systems simply out performing older ones and a good reason to consider replacing older systems.

The NUCs take everything on hard drive performance, but that isn’t a bit surprising, given that they all use solid state drives.  My SSD equipped desktop at work is the only one of the conventional systems that has similar performance.

The conclusion I’ve come to from this exercise is that the Celeron NUC is passable for light duty use, such as the email and web surfing duties that many of our customers do.  With a boot time of just 20 seconds and extremely low power consumption, the Celeron NUC  worth looking at.

The i3 and i5 versions are quite capable desktop replacements for office use.  They both have plenty of horsepower for normal office duties.

One feature of the i5 version is that it supports vPRO, meaning that it supports “out of band” network communication.  Put in layman’s terms:  We can take remote control of an i5 NUC even if the system won’t boot and needs to have Windows reinstalled.  For our customers trying to minimize tech time onsite, this is potentially a huge benefit.  The i5 NUC will also drive three monitors compared to the dual monitor capabilities of the other two NUCs (The i5 has one HDMI and two Displayport interfaces, the i3 and the Celeron units have dual HDMI interfaces).

There are four things to consider before picking any NUC as a replacement for your current desktop system:

1. The NUCs have limited storage.  The largest SSD I’ve found for the NUCs is a 480gb unit.  If you store large audio and video files, you can fill one of these up pretty quickly.
2. The NUCs do not have an optical drive.  With so much software now coming as downloads, this is less of an issue than it might seem.  If you back up your data to the cloud, or another machine on your network, then this is not a problem.  External optical drives run about $50.
3. The NUCs only have three USB ports.  If you plug in a keyboard, mouse, and a printer, you have used up all the ports.  Fortunately, USB hubs are inexpensive.
4. Audio output is via the video ports, so your monitor needs to have speakers or you are going to be using one of your USB ports for a USB audio device.

Does all this sound like fun?  Drop by and we’ll let you take them through their paces.

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