Actually the last one wasn’t really true. I logged into Facebook Ads Manager this morning to check the stats, and this is what I saw:

My campaign is targeting all Australians, and I had my daily budget of merely $5 (which I have upgraded to $8 as it hits the budget every single day). Over the last 4 days it gave me an impressive number of impressions (more than 60,000+ per day!) but very very low click through rate (0.2%). The effective CPM at the end is very cheap at $0.10 so I guess it is still a good deal if you are just doing branding and don’t really care whether people clicked or not.

I do plan to discontinue the campaign after my free credits have run out. I wonder how can Facebook make any money with such a low click through rate and all the freeloaders like me (hehe…)

How can a regulator body provide any assurance to anyone who registered a domain? They can turn up any time, strip off the domain from you, and tell you that the domain you have registered 12 months ago actually belongs to someone else. As domain names are critical intellectual property these days, no assurance from even your regulator body can be a bit worrying.

And how can a domain owner not noticing the lost of ownership until 12 months later?! Pingdom bombards me with emails if my websites were offline for more than 5 minutes! Unless of course you just bought the domain, park it somewhere else, together with your huge portfolio so one missing domain doesn’t really ring the alarm until the “stocktake”. According to WHOIS record of the current registrant, the ACN record cannot even be found at Business.gov.au. How MelbourneIT approves the registration is beyond me…

On a related news, auDA has increased the fee for Dispute Resolution Policy due to amount of work required to resolve a dispute. Hmmm…

See Mum! No PageRank!

I was shocked this morning when the SearchStatus Firefox plugin shows the Google PageRank of this blog as — nothing! It was 5 last time I checked which wasn’t that long ago. It wasn’t even a zero — the PageRank bar basically blanked out as though this is a brand new site that Google has no knowledge of it!

Nooo!!!

And I swear that I have not been selling text links, nor paid reviews. Google can’t just penalise me because I have been very slack in blogging?! When I try out some online PageRank checkers, some shows a 5, while others shows a -1. Hopefully it is just a tiny disturbance somewhere inside the Google Matrix…

Playground Now Has Google Sitelinks

The first thing after I discovered the disappearance of my PageRank is to check whether this site has been completely dropped from Google. So I searched for my name on Google, and was happy to see that this site still came up at top — together with Sitelinks!!

I thought you need to be an important site to earn those cute sitelinks on Google SERP? Maybe Google has finally recognised the significance of this site on the intraweb?!

Then I found out

1. Sitelinks page in Google Webmaster Tools still says “Google has not generated any sitelinks for your site“
2. Almost all other sites now have Sitelinks when you use their names as search query.

So well, everyone else got it. Worse, I can’t use Webmaster Tools to change them, as my Sitelinks actually don’t show the best links.

This does not occur with other search terms. Thanks for reminding me that it is indeed the Chinese New Year eve today!

The suggestion on “checking out a domain” has been:

1. Try to query on trust worthy website, such as Jay’s Domain Tools.
2. Try to use a standalone WHOIS client, for example the “whois” command on your Linux console.

The problem with (1) is — how can you classify the website as trustworthy? Anyone can slap a disclaimer “we do not sell WHOIS queries” but how do you know whether your queries are logged, and how they process the logs internally? What happy if the website changes hands? For the ultra paranoid, no web-based WHOIS tools are trust worthy.

Then, the “myth” is that command line WHOIS clients must be safe as you are querying the WHOIS server directly. The man-in-the-middle, i.e. the website acting as the front-end, is eliminated, thus there is no way your queries can be logged and resold. Well, the truth is, anything that can be queried can log those queries, and we are still ending up at ground 0 — are you trusting the source?

Who then, is the source that the command line WHOIS client is querying against?

On my Debian, Ubuntu and Gentoo boxes, when you apt-get install whois or emerge whois, it uses the WHOIS software from here, “an improved whois client” and part of many Linux distributions. From the source code, it appears the default WHOIS source for .com and .net is — Network Solutions! Under debian/changelog, it was changed from querying InterNIC to querying Network Solutions back in December 1999, i.e. 2x the eternity in Internet age.

That also implies that every .com/.net WHOIS query you make using Debian’s whois client, it is Network Solutions who receives the query and responds to it. It might be logged together with time and your IP address — we simply don’t know. I am not saying that NetSol is going to sell the queries on their WHOIS server to evil domainers. But then from NetSol’s track record (registering prior to clients confirming purchase, wildcard deployment on .com (Verisign is the parent company of NetSol), etc etc) — they will go low if there is financial gain from it. What they are going to do with the query log is probably anyone’s guesses.

On the other hand, GNU jwhois, which is the default WHOIS client on CentOS, still queries InterNIC for .com/.net domains, even at its latest 4.0 version. Now, who do you trust more? InterNIC who is operated by ICANN a “non-profit organisation”, or Network Solutions who is a child company of VeriSign, a public company? Then again on InterNIC’s whois page:

Results for .com and .net are provided courtesy of Verisign Global Registry Services.

I guess there is not much you can do about it. Still the old suggestion — only query when you are ready to buy!

How can I say bad things about a company that gives me such praises?! These guys are the best!

(Okay, sorry about the sarcasm. For more information about Network Solutions doing dodgy domain tasting please read Jay Westerda’s discovery on Domain Tools Blog, and my remark on the same topic at the Whirlpool forums last night. Here is the extract:

The thing is, dodgy registrars do domain tasting by putting heaps of ads on the domain to “test the water”. However it is not the case with Network Solutions — all they put on the domain is a link for you to buy that domain at their inflated price. Someone from NetSol commented on DotSause saying they are not monetising the domain.

www.dotsauce.com/2008/01…es/#comment-3565

Quote:

Network Solutions makes sure its search data is secure and we do not sell it any third party. I know that Network Solutions has no intention of keeping any searched domain or monetizing it.

I think what they did is probably trying to block the competition, so that no one can perform a WHOIS on NetSol and then register the same domain at GoDaddy for less.

The problem is, all the WHOIS queries might only be logged by the registrar and dodgy domainers have no way of knowing them (unless the registrars themselves are dodgy by selling the WHOIS queries). However all the domain changes are public knowledge from websites like DailyChanges.com.

Now, all the dodgy domainers don’t have to buy the WHOIS queries. All they need to do now is check the domains registered by NetSol as NelSol registers them as soon as WHOIS query is made. Since NetSol has no intention to keep and monetise those domains, the dodgy domainers can just snap them up when NetSol releases them.

At the end, NetSol is NOT helping their customers by registering these domains, but they are unintentionally (or intentionally??) helping the domain tasters.

Bad. Very bad.

They now have changed the landing page showing “This Site Is Under Construction and Coming Soon” as of this morning, but the practise of registering as soon as WHOIS query is made still remains.

It again proves the economy of resource overselling grows even faster than Moore’s law. Looking forward seeing DH getting bashed in web hosting forums for being extremely overselling, but in 6 months time everyone will be offering this amount of service.

I’ve written a more detailed coverage here. Btw, they now have a $99.99 off special that bring down first year of web hosting to USD$19.41, or AUD$26.

How did I do it?

No. I did not have a secret version of WordPress that can render the same page 5 times faster. In fact I have turned off WP-Cache so that each page view is re-generated. Well, sometimes I did wish WordPress can be faster, but that has remained a wish…

Basically, I said bye-bye to DreamHost, and migrated my blog to VPSLink, on a 256Mb OpenVZ VE running Gentoo Linux. I was interested in getting an OpenVZ VPS to play with and VPSLink has a life-time 50% off deal when prepaying 6 month… So far it is not bad — not as good as my Xen VPS on unxishell, but far more competent to run my blog in full speed. But they are in Seattle, so the ping-time from Sydney is marginally better than unixshell which is in Atlanta, and just a few ms shy from DreamHost which is in Los Angeles.

I’ll evaluate VPSLink for 6 month and I might move this blog again onto a Xen node afterwards. We’ll see.

As of DreamHost, I still have sites on it (like FuCoder.com and many FOCUS related websites). I love their big space, big pipe, and SVN repository hosting, but just not their over-stressed dual Opterons. I guess I’ve pretty much decided what I’ll do with my DreamHost account…

And just in case you are wondering why Scott hasn’t been blogging… I’ve been busy. Lots of things to do. I am wearing thin. Trying to re-do Anna‘s website sometime (which got destroyed 3 months ago). Etc. Etc…

Look. Linking is part of what makes the web work. If you’re actually concerned about every link you make being counted in some global database of site endorsements, you’re probably over-thinking just a bit. Life’s too short for that, ya know? Link and be linked to. Let the search engines sort it out.

Yes. Just let links do what they ought to do, and let search engines do what they ought to do.

Currently there are two camps — those who absolutely hated it and those who tried to get everyone to endorse it. Personally I do not approve nofollow tags — not to a point of hate but just could not understand why we need this. Besides they have achieved absolutely nothing in stopping the comment spam, they add extra overhead for web masters and bloggers to worry about.

However one thing that disgusts me the most is how some people used rel="nofollow" to explicitly discount or disapprove the link. And they make sure others know about it by adding “(nofollow used)” in bold type after the link. It is really search engine’s job to work out whether a link is public or negative publicity.

As of comment spams, they are probably dispatched by thousands of zombie hosts on the Internet. They only have one goal — to get the visitor to come to their site. They don’t care whether the traffic is by people clicking on a link in the comment spam, or organically from the search engine results. But do they care about the SERP ranking? I am not entirely sure about this one. However if people are looking for that those “specific” product, be that phentermine or Texas Hold’em, they will not be able to compete against those information sites anyway on SERP, as search engines are actually doing their jobs to actively discounting spam sites.

At the end, what eliminates comment spams? Search engines that can distinguish between spam and legitimate sites, and good well-trained spam filters that can distinguish between spam and legitimate comments. Definitely not rel="nocomment".

My take is this:

• If a site is geo-targeting Australian audiences and utilising lots of HTTP connections, then Australian host is better.
• Otherwise, choose an US hosting because it is cheaper and provides more space/bandwidth.

We all know that it takes 3 way handshaking to initiate a TCP connection. Therefore to start a HTTP connection, 12ms to Sydney and 180ms to LA round-trip time will be boosted to at least 18ms and 270ms — more if the server is in US East Coast or Europe. So for sites where there are many external links (JS, CSS, images, etc) they do add up, if each request is on different HTTP connections in cases where HTTP Keep Alive has been turned off, and there exists restrictions on the number of simultaneous connections.

It can also be quite noticeable in interacting with those “Ajax” applications where each click might trigger a HTTP connection to be established. Assume that web server takes no time to process that request, feedback might range from “instantaneous” verses “half a second later…”

However, both Australian hosting and US-based hosting can easily saturated a 1500kbps ADSL connection (though you might need a good US shared-host to do that). In this case, 12ms vs. 270ms of TCP initiation time does not really matter, when it takes both 5 minutes to bring down the big AVI file. So for sites that have few large files (video, mp3, etc) then maybe US-based hosting is a cheaper choice. (Hint: DreamHost offers 20Gb storage + 1Tb bandwidth, from USD$8 per month [affiliated link])

So for sites geo-targeting Australia, maybe the best way to do it is to have 2 hosting plans — one in Australia and one in the states. Put all your interactive scripts in the Australian host, and all the large media files overseas.

Make sense?

Actually I believe there are other reasons (which don’t actually apply to me).

• Prefer to support an Australian business.
• Prefer to have support during business hours.

Anything else?