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Wednesday 13 February 2008

The first domain name ever registered was Symbolics.com on March 15, 1985.

According to Guinness World Records and MSNBC, the most expensive domain name sales on record as of 2004 were:

Business.com for $7.5 million in December 1999
AsSeenOnTv.com for $5.1 million in January 2000
Altavista.com for $3.3 million in August 1998
Wine.com for $2.9 million in September 1999
CreditCards.com for $2.75 million in July 2004
Autos.com for $2.2 million in December 1999

Saturday 2 February 2008

webhosting tips

1. Don't pay for space you don't need and probably won't use. Unless you have a huge amount of graphics on your site or a lot of pages (say 500 or more), you won't need a lot of space.

2. Even if a web host charges less if you pay for a year in advance (or even 6 months), don't do it. Pay the monthly rate until you have been with the web host for a couple of months. That way you can make sure you like them and won't be stuck with them if you don't.

3. Go with a web host that has a money back guarantee or offers you free use of their service for a certain time. That way if their service doesn't live up to what their ads promise, you aren't out any money.

4. Go with a web host that has a high uptime percentage. If your site is down, no one can see it. 100% uptime is unrealistic, but if your web host is down unexpectedly more than once or twice while you are in your trial period with them, it isn't a good sign. Go to another web host. If they are down unexpectedly for a few hours or more even once while you are in your trial period with them, it isn't a good sign. Go to another web host.

5. Go with a web host that has excellent customer service. When you are having a problem, you want help and you want help fast. Don't necessarily believe that just because there's a phone number listed and the web host says it offers 24 hour phone support that they actually do. Some of them don't. Along the same lines, don't rule out a company just because it doesn't provide phone support. Some very good companies only provide e-mail support.
So how do you know which web hosts provide good service and which don't? You can't totally, but there are two things you can do to reduce the risks of signing up with a non-responsive web host. You can get recommendations from others (ahem, our list of best cheap web hosts is a good start ; )) and you can test out the service for yourself.
E-mail the support team of the web host you are interested in with a basic question such as "What are your hours of technical support?" at off hours (evenings or weekends) and see how fast they respond. If you e-mail a web host on Friday night and they don't respond until Monday, it's a bad sign. Don't go with them. Most responsive web hosts will respond within 4 hours of your e-mail between the hours of 8am and midnight. If they don't respond between midnight and 8am I would cut them some slack. If they don't respond within at least 10 hours, regardless of when you send it or what day of the week, look elsewhere.

6. Never go with a web host that owns your domain name. If you are ever unhappy with their service and want to go to another web host, you can't take your domain name with you. It's theirs. Not yours. Most web hosts will host your domain name for you, but this is different than owning it. How can you tell? Ask if you can keep your domain name with your current registrar. If you can, then they don't require ownership.

7. Don't have your web host register your domain name for you. It's cheaper if you register it yourself.

8. Don't transfer control of your domain name to your web host. If you aren't happy with your web host, you will have to wait on them to release your domain to you before you can go to another web host. Occasionally web hosts have been known to drag their feet on this. If you register the domain name yourself, it's cheaper and you have total control over it at all times.

prevent indexing

To avoid undesirable content in the search indexes, webmasters can instruct spiders not to crawl certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain. Additionally, a page can be explicitly excluded from a search engine's database by using a meta tag specific to robots. When a search engine visits a site, the robots.txt located in the root directory is the first file crawled. The robots.txt file is then parsed, and will instruct the robot as to which pages are not to be crawled. As a search engine crawler may keep a cached copy of this file, it may on occasion crawl pages a webmaster does not wish crawled. Pages typically prevented from being crawled include login specific pages such as shopping carts and user-specific content such as search results from internal searches. In March 2007, Google warned webmasters that they should prevent indexing of internal search results because those pages are considered search spam

getting indexed

The leading search engines, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages that are linked from other search engine indexed pages do not need to be submitted because they are found automatically. Some search engines, notably Yahoo!, operate a paid submission service that guarantee crawling for either a set fee or cost per click.Such programs usually guarantee inclusion in the database, but do not guarantee specific ranking within the search results. Yahoo's paid inclusion program has drawn criticism from advertisers and competitors. Two major directories, the Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory Project both require manual submission and human editorial review.Google offers Google Sitemaps, for which an XML type feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure that all pages are found, especially pages that aren't discoverable by automatically following links.
Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by the search engines. Distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it "ranks", the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines

Name that domain

Whether creating new domains or acquiring existing ones, the current trend (which doesn’t show signs of changing) is to stay away from those domains that have digits and/or hyphens, as both naming schematics devalue a domain. The only exceptions are specific 3- and 4-digit domain names, most of which are all taken

If you’re holding domains for longer than a year, it’s a very good idea to have them all set to auto-renew. Make sure all of your contact info is correct and updated, and if necessary, change registrars. Whatever source of funds (credit card, PayPal) you use to pay for auto-renew should always have enough in extra funds so that in case you miss the notices, you’re still able to avoid auto-cancellations, which usually cost more to get back than a new registration

Bootstrapping isn’t so much a single fundraising technique, as it is a ‘do it yourself’ mindset of leveraging what you earn back into growing your business. Entrepreneurs engaged in bootstrapping take very little of the company profits out of their business early on, and instead use those funds in lieu of a formal bank loan or venture capital. If you are anxious to quickly expand your domaining portfolio and can afford to live without the immediate profits, consider leaving all or most of your profits in the business to leverage new purchases. Bootstrapping is the poor entrepreneur’s way to compete against larger competitors, because by reinvesting their gross profits back into the business, bootstrappers gain a return which is functionally equivalent to compound interest

Brute Force

Automated Domain Research Tools (DRT’s) allow you to sift through millions of available domains to find the few thousand that you might be interested in buying. But getting from those thousand to identifying the few specific domains you want to purchase can often be accomplished only through brute force. By “brute force” we refer to the most common domaining technique, which involves the use of a compilation of different manual research tools to identify the most lucrative domains. Each tool listed in this category simply helps to facilitate the process of manually going through and examining each potential domain on an individual basis (thus the “brute force” moniker). While it is impractical to cover every sort of tool that would fall into the “brute force” category, we have compiled a few of the most common tools to get you started.

AjaxWhois: is a convenient web2.0 domain search engine that executes multiple Top-Level Domain (TLD) queries on a root domain name. This can be a time-saver if you already have a specific root domain name in mind to purchase.

dnScoop provides a variety of information about a domain, including whois, traffic, domain history and popularity, appraisal, pagerank check, inbound links and more.

DigitalPoint is a set of webmaster tools geared more for websites and SEO’s, but which also provides some helpful tools such as a keyword recommendation tool which can help you come up with new domain ideas and word combinations.

DomainState tools is a suite of browser-based domaining tools and links to trademark databases.

Domain Tools has a suite of useful tools for domainers, including domain history, reverse IP (to see what other websites are hosted on an IP), DNS tools (whois, traceroute, etc.), domain monitor, and more.

PagerankPredict is a very simple tool that gives you a predicted Google pagerank for a domain. This tool is handy if you plan to build out a domain with content. It is also free, but the site limits you to 5 queries per hour.

SearchStatus is a robust SEO, SEM and domaining tool that works as a plugin for the Firefox browser. It will enable you to quickly get an overview of a potential purchase as well as a look and what backlinks are powering your competitors’ sites.

The next strategy, automated volume buying, is simply that; using an application to automatically search for available domains that meet your pre-set criteria, and purchasing the domains that result from the search. Automated volume buying requires, first and foremost, an excellent application to accept your search criteria and conduct the searches. While there are a number of domain research tools available for purchase, many top domainers use a customized version. No matter which volume buying tool you’re using, however, they all work in roughly the same way by allowing you to search WHOIS servers and filter results by keywords, Overture price ranges, search engine results, etc. So, for example, you could filter your potential domains by those that have a minimum of 1000 keyword searches per month and which yielded more than a top bid of $1.00 on Overture. While it is certainly true that now that more people are using automated volume buying tools the easiest bargains are usually taken, domainers can still find a good haul of cheap .com’s as long as they stay ahead of the curve by getting creative with their filter criteria.

While the trademark typo domain loophole has closed, a very legitimate and ethical domaining technique is pursuing keyword typo domains. Keyword typo domains (e.g., loans.com) can bring in a good deal of type-in traffic and are often significantly undervalued. While normally these aren’t the type of domains that someone would want to build a high-value company around (though typo domain Voyuer.com went for $112,000 in 2005), smaller individual webmasters are always in the market for targeted type-in traffic, so these sites are often in high demand among small-time domain purchasers.

One of the original domainer buying strategies was to hunt for any trademarked names that hadn’t yet been purchased, and failing that, to purchase typos of those domains. These trademark typo domains often yielded a lot of type-in traffic, and because e-commerce law hadn’t yet developed to its current state, companies would often buy out these domainers at very inflated prices. But if you’re thinking about getting into trademark typo domaining, the ship has sailed. Current trademark law treats domainers that are seeing lots of traffic from a typo domain, and don’t otherwise have a legitimate business use for owning the name, as illegal trademark diluters. As such, trademark typo domainers typically have to turn over the domain to the trademark holder with little or no compensation. Simply stated, avoid the trademark typo strategy altogether.

domainer

A domainer is someone who earns a profit buying and selling domain names. The philosophy is similar to the stock market: buy low and sell high.
Here are 28 tips, tools, techniques and financing options to get you started on your way to successful domaining.