Scott Yang's Playground

ZDNet: auDA took away a domain from Sydney-based web-business after dispute, with only 24 hours notice, and it wasn’t even that poor guy’s fault! His business lost the domain name because 12 months ago NetRegistry mistakenly registered the dropped domain for them, although the original owner has renewed it. That just sounds dodgy. How can [...]

This is a follow up to yesterday’s post, where I looked at Network Solutions’ domain tasting practise. It has long been warned on various Internet forums that you should not make WHOIS queries on registrars’ web interface if you do not intend to buy straight away. Your queries might be logged by the dodgy registrar [...]

Network Solutions is the best because they registered Scott-Yang-Rocks.com even before I asked them to! All I did was making a WHOIS query on their website to check the availability of this domain, and they have registered that domain without me going to the checkouts! How can I say bad things about a company that [...]

DomainTools: Wholesale price for .COM and .NET is going up, as $6.42 is the new wholesale price for these two TLD, recently issued by Verisign. We are expecting to see the price raises across all retailers and resellers later this year. Thanks to the monopoly! We are going to pay more for a piece of [...]

HostingFu: EveryDNS Under DDoS Attack, which brought down many domains over the last 2 days. It actually hosts half of my active domains, including this very website and focuser.net. Slashdot also reported it today. Definitely not the first time. If you are on focuser.net and were wondering why your blogs were down yesterday, it was [...]

Matt of WordPress.com has announced domain registration and mapping for their blogging service — $10/year if you already have a domain registered, or $15/year if you register through them. Very well priced service on a very scalable platform. I’ll sign up if I don’t already have more blog sites than I can currently handle.

I run a small community blog site FOCUSer.net, who hosts WordPress blogs for members or ex-members of FOCUS. It also has an aggregator that tracks other FOCUS-related blogs, hosted on my box or elsewhere, and merge them into one single page in chronological order. I do not go around the web trying to search out [...]

While searching for “dreamhost” on Google, I spotted Angela’s new addiction — buying domains for enthusiasms over potential future projects. I think for the last 2 months I have also been struck by the same disease. Maybe not domain squatting, but sometimes I just do a WHOIS search, and “hey, how come no one has [...]

After my article on Bargain Blog about the cheapest .au registrar, I decided to transfer my yang.id.au domain from NameScout, whom I registered with since July 2002, to IntaServe, because it is (a) $2/year cheaper (b) having an Australian contact number. However, the transfer didn’t proceed that smoothly.

FOCUSer.net has been bambarded with lots of comment spams lately. As many members do not check their emails regularly for comment notifications, many spam messages were left there for a day or two. I have been tuning the Apache server configuration to block out spam bots, but many of them still manage to slip through [...]

EveryDNS, the free DNS provider that I have used for two of my domains, was under DDoS attack back in February this year. It took a few days to recover from the downtime, and many people who have hosted their domains on EveryDNS suffer as result. Unfortunately this seems to be happening again. This morning [...]

The saga continues from the story yesterday… Last night at around 10′ish, I thought EveryDNS has already been fixed because I can now see their website and use their web interface to modify my DNS configuration. I woke up this morning, and found some of my spooled emails still cannot be sent because source domain [...]

Introduction Most domain name registrars won’t let you host your own DNS unless you have both master and slave (primary and secondary) DNS servers set up properly. However, not many people are priviledged to have that many boxes on the Internet, and sometimes it will be nice to have someone else (hopefully someone reliable enough) [...]