Thursday, June 16th, 2011
While it is important and all but essential for businesses of different sizes, types and purposes to have websites, those that are serious about increasing traffic to their site and converting interest into sales and lucrative connections know that strategies must be used to increase the number of visitors to your site. No longer is it just enough to create a site and expect people to come, website owners must be active in attracting visitors to their sites.
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Thursday, June 9th, 2011
The power and potential of the internet is so vast and incredible that offers you as a business owner the potential to reach millions of new customers. In this day and age, businesses that choose not to have a website are putting themselves at serious risk and disadvantage – customers and clients want and expect you to have an online presence and a web-based source of information and access.
Thursday, June 2nd, 2011
As business owners embark on the process of setting up a website for their business, it quickly becomes apparent that a quality web hosting site is needed. It may sound like a simple requirement, but there is a plethora of hosting companies from which to select and suddenly, discerning the good from the not so good becomes a perplexing task.
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Thursday, May 26th, 2011
Other than having a vague sense that ‘SEO’ is important, many businesses and business owners have a limited understanding of what SEO is and the impact that it can make.
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Thursday, May 19th, 2011
Few things are more important to the success of a business website than its domain name. There may be a lot of technical aspects to consider when a website is created, developed and launched – such as: the use of dedicated servers, platforms and programming, but your domain name serves as the headline of your business.
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Thursday, May 12th, 2011
When we consider the ways that business is done in this day and age and the ways that people go about searching for a business or service, it is all but imperative for businesses to have a website.
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Thursday, May 5th, 2011
These days words such as ‘blog’ and ‘blogging’ have become part of the vernacular. We associate these words with the sharing of information and ideas via the internet and, for many of us, blogs provide a useful forum for learning about the experiences of others and becoming privy to their recommendations and warnings – on a seemingly infinite number of topics.
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Thursday, April 28th, 2011
It is important to begin developing strategies to protect your business’ brand as soon as you launch its web presence. A key element of your online brand is a good domain name.
You can find strategies for selecting a good domain name in a number of places. However, some basic principles to keep in mind are to try and keep the domain name simple, keep it close to your business name or how people refer to your business, and make it easy to pronounce and spell by avoiding hyphens, numerical characters and unusual spelling if you can.
Once you have selected a domain name that is available, you should register your domain with a reputable domain name registrar (a service that Digital Pacific provides). It is then time to start protecting your brand. It’s best to start doing this before you launch your presence, as the process will become more difficult and costly as your brand grows in popularity.
Prevent Domain Prospecting
Domain name prospectors buy domains that might be used by businesses that aren’t yet online. They are gambling that once a business decides it wants the domain name, it will be prepared to buy the domain off the prospector for an inflated price. This is also referred to as cyber squatting, and is a practice that has extended to buying similar sounding domain names and obvious misspellings of common words. Prospectors will often set up small portal web pages at a domain and use broadly relevant links to take advantage of affiliate marketing and advertising. These portals generate revenue through page views, high click through rates and affiliate purchases.
Domain prospecting is an issue for you and your business because typos happen all the time. Less savvy internet users may not even realise that they have typed in the wrong address and will think that a domain prospector’s useless page is your business. This is not a good outcome for you as you are unable to control the experience that these potential clients have while they are searching for your products and services.
Strike First
A quick and effective way to stop someone from squatting on variations of your domain name is to register the most likely variations yourself. You should consider registering variations across the major top level domains of .com, .org and .net, as well as the country level domains of your main markets for maximum protection. For example, in Australia this means registering .com.au, .org.au and .net.au domains where possible. AuDA, the body responsible for the governance of Australian domain names, places specific restrictions around registering many of the .au domains. This will reduce the likelihood of opportunistic squatting around your .au domain names, but will not protect you completely.
Guard Against Bad Publicity
Another domain name phenomenon worth watching is disgruntled customers (and sometimes competitors) using variations of your domain name to publish negative impressions of your brand. A common technique is to add the word “sucks”or something similar to the end of a domain name and use the site to publish negative reviews and opinions of a service. A well-known example is the large number of sites that have been created to discuss the service of PayPal (try typing “paypal sucks” into Google for a taste). While it won’t be economical to register every potential offensive domain, it could be to your benefit to own and control the more obvious options if you operate business that focuses on customer service.
Be Ever Vigilant
Protecting your brand through domain name ownership is not a “cheap and easy” task. Less reputable organisations will continue to look for new ways to gain an advantage off the back of your brand, and different techniques will continue to be developed. However, protecting your domain name has clear and immediate benefits for all businesses serious about owning their brand and reputation online.
Tuesday, April 12th, 2011
As you may have already read, the internet is, in theory, about to run out of IP addresses. “What does that even mean?” I hear you ask, and I’m glad you did.
There is a lot of conflicting information about this address situation (also known as “IPv4 exhaustion“) and what it means for internet users, with the most obvious concern cited that somehow the internet is about to “run out of room”.
Rest assured that this is not the case. There are plenty of IP addresses for everybody.
What is an IP address anyway?
IP stands for Internet Protocol, which is a way for devices to communicate with each other over a network. While the technical details of the Internet Protocol and the network communications protocol stack are many and detailed, it is enough to know that every device that communicates on a network that uses IP needs to have a unique number. This number is referred to as an IP address. Almost every network currently in use, including the internet, uses IP as part of its underlying framework.
There are two versions of IP in use today: IPv4 and IPv6.
Why does it look like we are running out of addresses?
The way that IP is structured creates a finite number of possible addresses. The allocation of these addresses is managed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, which allocated the last large blocks of addresses earlier this year. While there are still many addresses available in already allocated address blocks, it is true that the supply of new IPv4 addresses is “exhausted”.
IP addresses were allocated inefficiently in the early days of the internet, leaving a large number of addresses unused and in the hands of private corporations and government bodies. As the number of people and devices attempting to connect to the internet has grown, the pressure has increased on the publicly available number of IP addresses.
While techniques such as private network addresses and Network Address Translation have been developed to combat the issue, IPv4 exhaustion remains.
IPv4 exhaustion is a concern as IP addresses underpin something that makes the internet easier to navigate — domain names. While machines can remember a series of numbers for a server address, it is not as easy for humans. Domain names were invented as a way of assigning natural language to IP addresses. After all, it is easier to remember www.digitalpacific.com.au than it is to remember 203.19.59.122.
Luckily for everyone, IPv6 is waiting in the wings.
What is the difference between IPv4 and IPv6?
The key difference between IPv4 and IPv6 in relation to the problem of IPv4 exhaustion is the number of addresses available for use. IPv4 uses a 32 bit numbering system, which allows for 2^32 or 4,294,967,296 theoretical unique addresses, although in practice the number available is smaller. By contrast, IPv6 uses a 128 bit numbering system, increasing the number of theoretically available addresses to 2^128, or approximately 340 undecillion (a number so large as to be almost meaningless).
Why are we still using IPv4 if IPv6 solves the problem?
A substantial obstacle preventing wide scale adoption of IPv6 is that software and hardware support is still maturing. While the latest versions of most operating systems now support IPv6 natively, hardware support is still immature, particularly at the consumer level. Consumers replace hardware such as routers and switches less often than they upgrade their software, leaving a large amount of legacy hardware still in use that is not IPv6 ready or capable.
Another issue is that IPv6 was not designed to be interoperable with IPv4. Anyone who wishes to offer an IPv6 service has to run it alongside an existing IPv4 service and use special network gateways to translate between the two different versions. This arrangement requires a service provider to maintain two separate services, increasing the amount of resources required to operate their business.
Should I be worried?
Short answer: no.
For the average internet user, the internet will continue as it has always done before. For example, Digital Pacific was recently assigned around 64 million IPv6 addresses, guaranteeing that your favourite web hosting company won’t run out anytime soon. This does not include all the IPv4 addresses still available for Digital Pacific customers.
The techniques that have been pioneered to combat IPv4 exhaustion will continue to provide enough space for the internet to keep growing in the short term. These techniques also buy time necessary to enable IPv6 adoption to increase and to enable more IPv6-ready consumer hardware to enter the market.
For now, there is still enough room for everybody.
Wednesday, April 28th, 2010
AuDA, the Australian domain authority, has recently released the Domain Drop List on their official website. The Domain Drop List will mention all domains in the .au domain that are about to be purged from the registrant system, and then put back on the market as available to be registered by anyone who so desires. The list contains both domains that have simply expired and domains that have either been deleted by the previous owner, or by auDA themselves. This, along with other policy changes, first appears daunting to current .au domain owners, but upon further review provides several benefits to those using the list to their advantage.
A Word of Caution
Being in the business of domain names, we at Digital Pacific cannot stress enough how important it is to stay on top of your domain renewals. Registering a domain name does not entitle you to that domain name forever; when a registration period ends, and the domain name has gone without renewal, the domain name is then put on the drop list. Once officially purged, the domain name is put back on the open market.
Just imagine losing a business domain name, a crucial part of your Internet business identity and online marketing endeavours, just because you forgot to make the renewal date.
Now, with the Domain Drop List, auDA also mentions the exact time that these names will be purged from the system and put back on the market. Anyone who is desperately after a certain domain name will now know exactly when they are able to attempt a registration, meaning it might be a bit more important for you to know your renewal dates.
What can you do?
Don’t worry! Simply staying on top of your renewal date is key. If you can do that, then there should be no problems with your account, and no cause to lose your domain name. Also, with the recent policy changes from auDA, you can create a common renewal date if you have more than one domain name. This keeps you from having to manage multiple domain renewal dates.
Besides the expired domain names, the drop list also mentions the domain names that have been voluntarily canceled by the domain owner. These domain names are those that the previous owner has decided he/she no longer wants. However, these previous owners are still able to forfeit their cancellation at any point up to the purge date if they should change their mind.
In some cases, auDA is the one that has decided to cancel the domain names, in which case they would also have to be the ones to overturn this decision before the purge date.
The Benefits of auDA’s New Policies
It’s not all “watch your back” with the new policy rules in place by auDA. They actually open up some doors to those willing to use them and the Domain Drop List to their advantage.
Entrepreneurs, for example, might find it useful to choose a domain name that has been previously owned, and here’s why:
For entrepreneurial individuals that are either looking to diversify a business or start a new venture, the domain drop list is an excellent first place to look. You may be pleasantly surprised by what is about to be dropped and enjoy additional benefits by choosing to snatch one up.
Other Policy Features to Note
If you happen to find a domain name you are interested in on auDA’s drop list, you can visit our homepage after the expiry period to start the domain registration process.
For further reading, check out Domain Name Basics and Frequently Asked Questions.
How do you feel about auDA’s new Domain Drop List and policy changes? Do you like the idea of seeing the exact purge dates for expired domains on the auDA website?
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