DomainTools Blog

Need Some Advice? DomainTools Can Point You in the Right Direction.

At DomainTools, we spend many hours working with our clients to ensure that the services we offer meet the varied needs of website owners, domain investors, and brand agents. What many people may not realize is the level of support and advice we provide daily to the non users of our services. Many registrants are not receiving or finding the necessary information they need to properly manage their domains. While we are not obligated to address these issues, we take pride in providing this helpful information in the hopes of aiding individuals and organizations in being better able to manage their domains and associated data.

A list of the most common issues we receive from non users:

• How do I/we update or change our DNS? My hosting company said to contact you guys.

DNS changes can only be made through the registrar where the name is currently registered.  You should already have an established user account where your name is registered from which you can log in and update/change the DNS for your domain.  If you need assistance with this please contact the Support Team where the name is registered.

• How do I/we update or change the WHOIS data for my domain name?

All of the information we display comes directly from the source registrar.  DomainTools has no authority or capacity to change or update any WHOIS record on our site.  You should already have an established user account with your registrar from which you can manage your domain name.  Please contact their Support Team for assistance.  Once you have updated the information with your registrar, the information we show will also update accordingly.

• Why do I/we have to provide WHOIS data? What purpose does WHOIS data serve?

WHOIS services provide public access to data on registered domain names, which currently includes contact information for Registered Name Holders. The extent of registration data collected at the time of registration of a domain name, and the ways such data can be accessed, are specified in agreements established by ICANN. For example, ICANN requires accredited registrars to collect and provide free public access to the name of the registered domain name, nameservers and registrar, the creation and expiration date,  and the contact information for the Registered Name Holder (registrant) and the technical contact and administrative contact of the registered name.

• I need my Authorization code. How do I/we request or Authorization/EPP code to transfer our domain name?

Your transfer authorization/EPP information can only be requested from the current registrar where the domain is registered.  The authorization/EPP will be sent to the current Administrative Contact email address listed in the account.  Most registrar’s offer the ability to request this electronically or offer information on how to request a transfer.  If you need assistance please contact the Support Team at your current registrar.

• My/Our website is no longer visible on the web, why is that?

There are many reasons why a domain website may no longer be visible on the web.  It is best to always contact your Webmaster or Hosting Company first for assistance.

• I/We failed to renew our domain, how do I go about getting it back?

Registrants who fail to renew their domain name are given the opportunity to renew the name while it remains in the ‘Redemption Period’. As long as the name remains in the Redemption Period, most registrars will allow you to re-register the name for an additional fee so that you do not lose the name.  After this period, the domain is set to pending delete and made available for re-registration soon thereafter.  If you need assistance please contact the Support Team at your registrar.

While many of these questions seem very basic to the experienced domainer, they are serious issues for people who simply do not know or have never had to find these specific answers before. We prefer to take the time to research each inquirer’s domain and correctly direct him or her to the correct registrar or hosting company. We explain and define many terms that are associated to domain registration, renewal, redemption, hosting and website creation. By providing the same level of client service to non users of DomainTools that we do to our clients, we will help to educate new domainers and foster good will toward the entire domaining community.

Knowledge Base for DomainTools Members

We also maintain an online Knowledge Base that is a great resource for DomainTools members who are seeking answers to questions about membership options and how to use different DomainTools products and services. If you haven’t leveraged this resource yet, we encourage you to visit our online Knowledge Base.

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A great new book just hit the stands, “The Domain Game” by David Kesmodel is an intriguing book about our industry. The book is filled with people that I am intimately familiar with, so it was fascinating to read the book on many different levels. I was also mentioned a few times in the book but the best part was reading the many other stories in the book that I had never heard. There are new facts which have never seen the light of day that are now shared publicly in this book. Mr. Kesmodel was a Wall Street Journal reporter that quit his job and immersed himself into the domain community for about a year so he could write this book.

It was a book Kesmodel said had to be written, there was just too much to uncover. When an investigative journalist gets embedded inside a secret industry a lot of dirt and details are going to come out and they did. Readers are able to follow as people in the Industry got those million dollar domains for $50.

The Domain Industry has always been shrouded in secrecy so I was surprised how many people opened up for this book. Kesmodel went beyond interviews, he searched public records and talked to neighbors and friends of some of the people he investigated.

When reading the book I started jotting down notes about when people where mentioned in the book, it may not be completely accurate but hopefully it is 95%. There was no index in the book so I am sharing the one I made so anyone can quickly find people as you skip through the book. The book is 9 chapters and hands down the best Tutorial/Introduction on the domain space I have seen. I hope there is a second book in the series because I know several hidden chapters that have not been told yet!

Official Description of the book:

Almost everyone has heard a tale of someone getting rich by selling an Internet domain name for a staggering price. But few understand the secretive world of domain investing, a game that a growing number of people are playing around the globe. The Domain Game chronicles the exploits of leading domain investors and explains how this mysterious market works. Learn how an Oklahoma watermelon farmer wound up owning some of the world’s most valuable Web addresses, from recipes.com to chairs.com, and how a college dropout became a multimillionaire by scooping up domains that others abandoned amid the dot-com bust. Find out how the rise of Google and Yahoo has helped boost the fortunes of domain investors. And explore the shenanigans of investors who snag names associated with corporate trademarks. Finally, read how you can jump into this exciting market with a relatively small initial investment. It’s a market with high risk, but huge potential reward.

You can order the book for $19.99. So I highly suggest it.

Inspired by last year’s $20,000 success, Domain Roundtable is back at it again! So, get ready to press your luck Saturday, April 19 as you are invited to Gamble for Good at the Domain Roundtable Conference.

For the event, DRT has teamed up with TrafficZ and Grassroots.org to give attendees exclusive access to Club 443, San Francisco‘s hottest nighttime spot. With a full open bar, craps, cards, roulette, and music by San Francisco’s favorite DJ Matteo, guests can get down to some risky business without chancing a loss.

No, at Gamble for Good, you can’t lose. We’re proud to say that all proceeds from the evening go directly to Grassroots.org, the tech industry’s leading charity organization. Grassroots.org is a national nonprofit campaign which seeks to empower charity organizations, and help them reach their financial and philanthropic goals, via current technology, savvy web-based marketing innovation, and a focused network of similar supportive web sites and organizations.

Casino games and raffles will be provided. Prize packages, totaling nearly $10,000 so far, include:

• One year of VO1000 Phone.com Subscriptions ($39.88 per month value)

• 20 hours of SEO consulting from SEO.com (value of $5000)

• One-year DomainTools.com Gold Membership (valued at $292)

• Domain Roundtable Future Conference registration (valued at $1000)

• 20 hours of web design by Graphics.net ($2000 value)

• Black Sabbath autographed CD ($150 value)
  

• Shania Twain autographed lyrics (value of $100)

• Rick Reilly autographed books ($60 each, $200 for collection)

Also, any attendees who register on or before Friday, April 17th will be recognized on the Grassroots.org website with a text-based link!

Domain Roundtable and Grassroots.org offer special thanks go to TrafficZ for sponsoring this event. Founded in 2001, TrafficZ is one of the oldest and most experienced domain parking and traffic monetization services in business today. Since its inception, TrafficZ has remained at the forefront of the domain industry, driven by an unyielding dedication to provide innovative products, cutting-edge technology, unparalleled service and best-in-class monetization. Widely regarded as a pioneering force, TrafficZ continually strives to maximize the potential of each and every domain asset by identifying its highest and best use and extracting maximum value for its clients. TrafficZ partners enjoy unsurpassed customer service, a renowned templating system, near-limitless customization options, dynamic and flexible content management solutions, SEO functionality, advanced auto-optimization technology, a comprehensive suite of domain analytics and, last but not least, industry-leading payouts.

So, play cards, place some bets, win prizes, make a difference in the world!

Interested in donating prizes or funds? Please contact support@grassroots.org for details.

For more information on registration or donations, please visit: http://www.domainroundtable.com/2008/gambleforgood

Betting on change,

The Domain Roundtable Team

For as long as I have been in this industry, I have been trying to promote transparency and market efficiencies. That is one of the reasons I started blogging. A lot of domainers choose to remain in shadows and I do not fault them for that. I take the exact opposite stance. If you have nothing to hide, then transparency is a good thing. The general public scorns domainers because they have built empires where nothing used to exist. Most earlier domainers saw the vision that domains would become valuable and they registered them like there was no tomorrow. The more generic the better. Domainers had no problem laying money on the line to secure domains from other early registrants. For domains to reach the same prices that we see on real property we need to see transparency, market efficiency, and clear laws.

Transparency
Hiding the details or obscuring facts is not good for the industry in general. In auctions, usernames should be displayed. Ebay and Snapnames led the way with this and it created a very healthy bid environment for online auctions. When big bidders (people like Frank) are in there buying domains, they want to know they are not bidding against shill bids or people that run up bids. It is very common for a big bidder to call the auction house and ask the auctioneer for a verification on a new bidder that is bidding heavy. People wonder if the person is legit. When auction systems only disclose bidder1 vs bidder2 anonymous style bidders, there is an inherent distrust the system. Ebay has disclosed real usernames for years and I believe that is why it is the biggest auction system in the world. I am able to do my own verification checking on a user by looking at their 30 day history and how many people have filed a complaint against the user.

Who owns a domain or how many domains they own should be available somehow. Information is the key to the Internet economy. Domainers in general need to realize this and insist on it. Outsiders judge this industry as almost incestuous and rigged. Michael Arrington openly called domainers thugs and racketeers about 5 months ago on his blog. Outsiders in general don’t know what is going on when they look into our industry. Even someone like Mr. Arrington who used to be employed as a CEO inside our industry. We need to change the way outsiders perceive everything about domains and promote values that increase the integrity of the entire system for everyone. Imagine buying a house and not being able to get the history on it. Imagine doing business with someone on Ebay and not knowing if they are a first timer or a trusted power seller.

Banning an industry professional like myself from a domain forum reduces transparency in the industry. I am banned in some of the most popular forums in this industry not because of my conduct but because of tools and services that DomainTools provides. If I don’t meet openly published criteria, then that is rational, but if the reason is more intangible then I need to question the transparency of that organization and what values they operate under. I personally vow that all services which DomainTools operates will work in a transparent manner. If I am banned for operating transparently, so be it. I welcome the day when everything in this industry is open and transparent. That day will come.

Transparency also relates to portability of data. In an information economy, the information needs to be exportable and not locked in prosperity displays. I am a heavy believer in open APIs, full RSS feeds, and published standards for protocols. Let the data for a service live outside the interface. Any applications that DomainTools builds is built on APIs that everyone should have access to. So if we invent a new service, you can bet we want to make that API available for other people to put a User Interface on it. Anyone should have the ability to make a service that extend our services. If someone can do a better job then we can, then by all means let them. We will make the API that powers the infrastructure. Security is the only concern when making something open, so long as those concerns are addressed we will make APIs open. Our first product several years ago was a domain suggestion service, almost every registrar in the industry has used it and all of them implemented the user interface in a different way. The real service most companies sell is not the user interface but the underlying data service. Does Verisign have a user interface for DotCom? No. Everything is done by registrars and I believe this has made the market bigger. More people are marketing DotCom, more people are selling DotCom, and Verisign would never want to be back in 1997 when they were the only shopping cart on the Internet for it.

Market Efficiency
Let’s face it, the market is not very efficient right now. If you buy a domain and want to transfer it to your favorite registrar, you will be faced with hurtles of getting that domain out of the current registrar. You need to get the auth-code once you own a domain. If you have the auth-code it is reasonable you are the owner. Auth-codes didn’t exist 5 years ago, but yet when they did appear in the market, we did not get rid of the old checks and balances. So now that we have a system that is frankensteined together with auth-codes, registry locks, email confirmations, AND registrar denials as hurtles to transferring a domain. I would envision a secondary marketplace that allowed a person to buy a domain name, pay for the domain in escrow, receive the auth-code in escrow, instantly transfer the domain, and start using the domain. With the system we have in place, only experts can transfer domains and even then it takes calls and emails to beg for permission to transfer our own domains.

Buying and selling needs to get easier. When the market gets more liquid it will allow prices to rise. If you look at any market in the world that has inefficiency, you will see the prices are more depressed there then in places where the market is highly efficient.

In the coming months we will be releasing what we feel is a more efficient marketplace solution. We want to stress transparency and open protocols that anyone can use. With the amount of developers and domain companies that exist right now, it would be awesome if we didn’t even need to create an interface for it.

Clear Laws
The third tier to any marketplace operating efficiently are clear laws. Not a lot of large companies enter markets when the laws are not tested. We need clear direction and enforcement from ICANN and other governmental agencies on what is tolerated and what is not. The domain market right now is very much a wild west. Only passage of time will build the laws that govern the industry.