2008/07/18

Domain Name News

All five TRAFFIC auction providers revealed

Posted: 18 Jul 2008 08:53 AM CDT

According to some insider sources the two remaining auction providers for the Targeted T.R.A.F.F.I.C. auction in New York are Bido.com and Sedo. The full list of the live auction providers is:

Domain Convergence, October 6-8, 2008, Niagara Falls

.ME landrush registration starts off with chaos

Posted: 17 Jul 2008 11:38 PM CDT

According to numerous reports the landrush registrations for the .ME toplevel domain (operated by a partnership of GoDaddy & Afilias) is encountering problems. While several registrants are notified of their successful registrations of domains like “watch.me” and “hug.me”, it is not clear who will end up owning those domains.

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GeoDomain Expo Silent Auction nets $25k

Posted: 17 Jul 2008 11:05 PM CDT

The Domains has got the results of the Silent Auction for the Geodomain Expo. The total sales add up to $25,000.00 USD for 30 domains.

Domain Convergence, October 6-8, 2008, Niagara Falls

Update on Vancouver Power Outage Story

Posted: 17 Jul 2008 06:45 PM CDT

While the power outage was affecting the Vancouver area, DomainNameNews.com researched to see whether domains redirecting to Hitfarm and Name Administration were reachable. Hitfarm.com and sites like Vancouver.com were offline. We also reported that several domains we checked were redirected showing DomainSponosor landers instead of Hitfarm landers. During the outage, we were unable to reach Hitfarm so we made the assumption that this was a “Plan B”. We were wrong.

After speaking to company officials yesterday and working through some issue, the company confirmed that “Hitfarm.com User Interface, Vancouver.com, NameView.com & Reinvent.com sites were down, but Hitfarm monetization platform was unaffected.” Hitfarm domains that DomainNameNews.com found redirecting to DomainSponsor landing pages were not a result of a “plan B” caused by this power outage. Don Ham of Hitfarm stated “All PPC traffic continued to monetize and was unaffected by the power outage. We have servers all over the world so we serve the names as close to 100% as possible.” The domains DNN found going to Domain Sponsor pages were a result of technical change over we were making. I had briefly changed over the DNS server on my computer to use an older DNS server that had not been recently updated. Our techy caught some hell for this one. The domains we had checked were cached in the DNS and reflected old redirects to DomainSponsor. Our apologies to Hitfarm on the confusion.

Name Administration sites were completely offline for what we estimated to be close to 2 hours. We followed up with Frank Schilling of Name Administration who told us that the company also has planned for these type of situations. The company “learned the lesson of diversified hosting after factcheck.com.” Schilling stated that he believed the company sites were down for approximately an hour on Monday.

Rick Latona joins the Live Domain Auction Business

Posted: 17 Jul 2008 03:52 PM CDT

As just announced in his newsletter and on his blog, Rick Latona has now joined the Live Domain Auction Business and will be one of the five live auction providers at the coming Targeted T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Show in New York in September. It appears that each of the auction providers will be given one hour to hold their auction.

Domain Convergence, October 6-8, 2008, Niagara Falls