The Planet Blog

While I’m certainly not the first to blog on the subject of domain tasting, a.k.a. domain kiting, I wanted to chime in on the subject as someone who has managed domains from not only the reseller and registrar perspective, but as the registrant of my own domains. I hope this helps to clarify the issue for some of you.

First, a little history for those not completely familiar with the topic. On March 15, 1985, now-defunct computer manufacturer Symbolics, Inc. registered symbolics.com, the oldest still-registered .com domain. Creation of the World Wide Web was still four years away and Verisign wouldn’t exist for another decade, but that first registration was the beginning of the booming domain registration industry¹.

Changes to the domain registration system that would eventually lead to domain tasting did not occur until the late nineties. First, the creation of ICANN on Sept. 18, 1998, allowed for competition in the domain name industry. By the end of the twentieth century the cost for .com domains to dropped from $50 annually to $35 and, finally, six dollars a year. Before the end of ICANN’s first year, an agreement between the government-mandated non-profit and Network Solutions — then the .com registry — led to the creation of the Add Grace Period (AGP).

The AGP allows registrants to delete a domain name within five days of registration. The policy was created in response to demands from consumers who had incorrectly spelled their desired domain name during the registration process. While it is a very customer-service oriented policy, the AGP unintentionally led to the creation of the domain tasting industry.

My first near-encounter with domain tasting would come in August 2003, when EV1Servers became a reseller for Canadian-based registrar, Tucows. We sold domains for $5 a year, a great less than any other company offered .com domains at the time and a good amount less than we paid for them. Our hope was that the low price would drive registrants to our Web site, who would then lease dedicated servers for less than we would normally spend on pay-per-click advertising.

The low price did drive traffic to the site from potential server customers, but it was even more attractive to domain portfolio managers. These are companies that register thousands of domains and park ads and links on them, capitalizing on type-in traffic from those individuals either unaware of or averse to using search engines.

The companies who have since emulated the loss-leader domain strategy are careful to include terms we didn’t realize were necessary, like requiring the purchase of hosting, or increasing the price of renewals. Our policy allowed anyone to register as many domains as they desired, no strings attached – a lesson learned. Domain tasting employs a similar strategy. While portfolio management is considered a legitimate business, many consider domain tasting less so. They register thousands of domains and, like portfolio managers, aim to capitalize on type-in traffic. The difference is if they discover the traffic is less than favorable before the five days are up, the domain is deleted and the domain taster is refunded the cost of the domain.

It sounds like a harmless process. The domain goes back into the pool of domains available for registration and the domain taster moves on to another collection of thousands of domains. A look at ICANN’s numbers, however, reveals a practice that is out of control. Of the 1,784,772 .org domains registered by five registrars in January 2007, only 10,862 were retained after the grace period. That same month 47,824,131 .com and .net domains were deleted before the end of their grace periods.

Although there is come concern regarding domain tasting’s impact on the overall stability of the Internet, the real victims of this practice are not ICANN, the registries or registrars, but rather the registrants for whom the policy was instituted to protect. Domain tasters do not limit their potential business to newly registered domains. In fact, dropped names — names that were once registered, but were deleted from the registry upon deletion — are much more valuable to tasters than new names.

Registrants who are naïve about the domain registration system often fail to recognize the importance of keeping administrative contact information up-to-date. As a result, they miss their domain renewal reminders. Not wanting to pay redemption fees that have been known to top $300 (another practice under scrutiny), they assume they can simply wait until the domain has expired and register it again. When the domain is deleted they are shocked to find it registered by a company who will either keep the domain for the traffic it generates, or offer to sell it back to the registrant for ridiculously inflated prices.

ICANN and the various registries are working toward a solution for this broken process, but how do you balance the needs of the registrant at the time of registration and during accidental deletion? To most businesses it’s an insignificant loss, but to an individual running a site for charity or a student just cutting their teeth on the hosting industry it can be devastating.

I look forward to the eventual solution of this problem. In the interim, if you find yourself a victim of domain tasting, there are a few tricks that may help you get your domain back. First, whatever you do, do not visit your former domain name’s URL.

Traffic to the domain will only increase its value in the eyes of the taster. Also, do not contact the company that has registered your domain. Any perceived interest in the domain may drive the taster to put the domain up for auction. Simply wait five days and attempt to register the domain again.

If you find at that time the same taster still has your domain you need to decide if you’re willing to pay a large amount of money to get it back. In some cases you may be able to prove the domain is your intellectual property and use ICANN’s Universal Domain-Name Dispute Resolution Policy to regain ownership. Bear in mind this is a long and often expensive process. If a different taster has the domain, repeat the same process as above for as long as is necessary.

- Brooke

1. Source: ICANN

I was reading Thanh Tran’s blog post the other night and I realized that I had the other side of that story to tell. I joined Everyone’s Internet in 2001, as the original RAQ 4i servers were just starting to be deployed and most data centers were demanding a huge setup fee to go along with a monthly service charge of $600 or more. At the time, our core business was providing dial-up internet access and this “new hosting thing” was an experiment that the owners had decided to try out.

Our support started out with a focus on control panel guidance (who here remembers the Cobalt web interface?) and reboots (offered within 24 hours, when our sysadmin, Patrick Smith, would drive from the call center to the collocation facility and process a batch of requests). At the time, my primary job responsibility was to visit customer Web sites and make sure they did not contain any adult content, which they often did when you got beyond the home page. How’s that for a job description?

Things went along at a moderate pace until two things changed at roughly the same time. First, Sun purchased Cobalt and stopped playing nice, forcing us to expand our offering to white box dedicated servers. Second, we launched our first $1 setup fee sale. I remember that I had just taken over the Web Sales team, which was then part of our dial-up sales department.

All of a sudden our little six-person team was buried in inquiries, new orders and demands for upgrades. Heady time, especially when you consider how the rest of the “tech bubble” was in the middle of a serious meltdown, and all the economy pundits could talk about was the downturn in business and a growing recession.

Now that I think about it, the ride that started that day has never really ended. 1Ghz servers became 2.0GHz+; white box systems turned into all-Dell data centers; unmanaged dedicated hosting gave way to Custom Self-Managed Servers or Private Racks; and now EV1 has joined with The Planet.

What strikes me most about that last milestone is how we all thought we would be dealing with an alien race, and instead we found we were working with the same people we had always been working with. Sometimes literally, and yes I’m talking about you, Keith.

So here we are, just over a year later, and the company known for having the best data centers has joined forces with the company known for having the best network. We also have several new members of the family on board, determined to make sure we become known for having the best support ever. I only hope the next six years are exciting as the last six were. Then again, with a company like this, how could they be anything else?

- Aaron

I was interested in the recent acquisition of Postini by Google for $625m. Congrats to the team from Postini. I know a few of the guys that are out counting their money right now.

People can argue back and forth all day as to whether this was a reasonable valuation or how much of a strategic fit Postini is for Google. I for one was really surprised by the price, until I saw that it was an all-cash deal. All of my economics profs would always tell me there is no difference in how you choose to fund an acquisition, whether it be cash off the balance sheet, or financed through debt or through stock. However, it seems time and time again companies that generate huge cash balances on their balance sheet are eager to go out and buy with the cash they have.

Public companies that amass a large cash position face enormous pressure to spend the cash. All of that cash on the balance sheet is just dead weight from a valuation perspective. The obvious outs are invest in your company, but that leads to dilution of margin/EPS and hits to market cap; issue a dividend, but that means you’re admitting to the market that you aren’t a growth play; buy back stock, but that is useless unless you use a HUGE amount of cash; or go out an acquire with cash. I’ve talked to numerous executives who feel absolutely handcuffed by these forces. It’s even more frustrating to the guys working at the company who want to do something entrepreneurial from the inside. Having worked at public companies, I’ve personally had proposals shot down since executives would rather acquire than invest internally simply because they hated the alternative uses of cash.

Here is the opportunity and why the cards are stacked in the favor of aggressive startups and entrepreneurs. Simply put, startups and smaller companies provide a pressure valve for these cash-rich public companies that are looking for a growth engine for their businesses. It’s why these guys have VP’s of Corp Dev that are always out scouring the market looking for ways to spend money. These guys are often measured on how many deals they get done. All the more reason to take the jump with the next great SaaS company or media or content service.

Anyone who has worked for a company that’s been acquired knows how tough it can be. I’ve been through it a number of times. The old faithful from The Planet and EV1Servers know this as well as anyone. I know we’re all glad to be able to just focus on growing the business…

- Urvish

I was recently reminded of an old friend from India who moved to California a year back or so for a new gig as the networking guy at a mid-sized company. For simplicity’s sake, let’s just call him Raj (note: names have been changed to protect the innocent). As are most people starting a new job, he was eager to make a strong first impression by doing all the standard stuff really well, and he wanted to be responsive to any end-user request, especially anything coming from his new boss. On his first day, he was invited to a senior staff meeting and took detailed notes of all the stuff that was going on. Raj wanted to figure out how he could help — from a networking perspective. Now my friend is not like Apu from The Simpsons or anything, but English is his second language.

He heard exec after exec talk about how they didn’t have enough “bandwidth” to finish some project or another, and if they just had more “bandwidth” they’d be so far ahead of the game. Raj decided this was his opportunity to spring into action. He dutifully began analyzing RTG charts and even started installing network response testing agents. He definitely found some bottlenecks with some congested segments. Raj began building a plan to move from a number of shared segments to switched fabric to the edge for some of these apparent power users that needed more “bandwidth.”

He took the proposal to his boss, who reviewed it and complimented him on a thorough job and well articulated argument. Raj’s boss then proceeded to calmly and very politely explain to him what the execs meant when they referred to “bandwidth.” His boss was just happy that Raj didn’t have signing authority for that much gear. Needless to say, Raj now calls me a fair bit to make sure he’s got English vernacular down.

It just struck me as funny because the story came up as we were launching our unmetered bandwidth by Cogent. We were going through the same discussions to figure out how much capacity we needed relative to demand from our customers. There has also been conversations about which of our multiple data centers we’d provision to accommodate growth. English is my second language, and let’s just say I chose my words carefully after talking with Raj.

- Urvish

According to Wikipedia.org, O’Reilly Media coined the phrase Web 2.0 sometime in 2004. The term has since become ubiquitous, but it’s difficult to pin down when Web 2.0 — the focus of the Internet community on user-generated content — actually began.

When social-networking sites like MySpace began making news and gaining popularity of course I had to take a look. What I found was largely underwhelming. Not to disparage the creators of MySpace — that community is a force of nature, and something to be respected and admired by all Internet entrepreneurs — it just didn’t seem like a completely new concept.

After all, forums are comprised of users who generate their own content, upload photos to their profiles and create online communities, usually based on a particular interest or hobby. These are communities nonetheless. Who knew sites like Web Hosting Talk and our own humble customer forums would be the unacknowledged godfathers to an entire movement called Web 2.0?

Hopefully the popularity of forums won’t diminish like other user-generated content formulas. I’ve always felt the advantage forums have over other types of communities is their ability to foster dialogue in an arena overcrowded with monologues. And yes I am aware of the irony of using a blog to make that statement.

It’s my belief that both mediums of communication are essential to building relationships with our customers. In fact, I’d like to think that we add value that even goes beyond exchanging credit card numbers for dedicated servers. Blogs provide an opportunity to communicate a concept, idea or opinion to its fullest, while communication in our forums is mostly reactive versus informative.

So until next time … I’ll see you on the forums!

- Brooke

Despite having traveled a fair bit and having been born in India, I’ve never been to China. I’ve always really wanted to go. Heck, my wife and I even considered getting married at the Forbidden Gardens here in Texas. As cool as that place is, I have to believe that the real deal is much more impressive.

While no one ever really needs one, it seems to me that the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing might just give me the perfect excuse to go. If going to Beijing by itself wouldn’t be cool enough, its even more interesting when you hear about the preparation the city is going through, whether that be far fetched attempts at weather modification to stamping out bad translations on street signs all the way to mass education on etiquette in preparation for a global flock of visitors.

As ridiculous as this might sound, the work of the Olympics organizing committee reminds me a lot about my work here at The Planet. In preparation for the Olympics, this group has analyzed and anticipated the needs of their visitors/customers, built out solutions to meet those needs and ultimately are in the process of building out a scalable infrastructure that can accommodate a glut of demand.

Now, you’ve heard Will and Jeff talk about meeting our customer needs through building scalable networks or having N+1 redundancy within our data centers. While I’m always interested in what those guys are up to, my job is really about identifying needs and helping build solutions, which may sound pretty unbelievable when I say that I work in Marketing. In any case, many of you may remember we did a customer satisfaction survey and followed up to get a better view of what products and services our customers. Remember the banners in the customer portal?

First of all, I want to thank the thousands of you that took time to respond. There were a lot of quick hits that we learned and responded to. For instance 49% of you said that you were concerned about bandwidth prices and overages and we launched a promotion on unmetered bandwidth, or that 70% of you rated increased storage capacity as Important or Very Important, which led us to release our Managed Dedicated SAN offering . We heard you loud and clear on a number of others products and services, but some of them will take a bit longer before we can rollout, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, I wish we could get a little weather modification here before the summer heat really sets in.

- Urvish

A couple of months ago we sent out a survey to all of our customers to get a barometer on how we’re doing. The response rate was way better than we expected and way beyond typical survey response rates. So thanks to everyone who took the time to let us know what’s on your mind. It really helps us do a better job, which is always on our minds here at The Planet.

I’m going to throw this out and see what happens. If you have ideas about what we can do to grow our business with new products and services for our dedicated servers that are important to you, let me know. Like for instance are there servers our competition offers that we don’t and you want? Is there an application you’d like that we don’t provide?

For the first and best ideas that we decide to pursue, I’ll send a $250 American Express gift card. With your feedback, we can consider how we might be able to include it in our offerings and at prices that are spread across a lot of companies, which means a big costs savings for you. I’ll be sure to pass the credit along to those who provide the ideas too.

Thanks for letting me know what’s on your mind.

- Steve