Next Monday thru Thursday, January 21-24 is the DOMAINfest conference in Hollywood, California, and I will be there. I am eager to attend the conference for many reasons, more than just getting away from the cold and snowy northern US.

As many of you have seen I write quite a bit about domain names here on The Hot Iron. This is related to my own personal interest and the importance of domain names, going well beyond the selection of one for a Web site. Granted that is still hugely important, but the reasons for purchasing domain names are many, and this sector of the Internet has spawn its own publications and conferences, including DOMAINfest. I am excited about the topics covered and am hoping to meet in person many of the people whose blogs I read and have learned from their leadership in this area.

On a professional development front, it marks the first conference I have attended since I started Dunkirk Systems. Though the business has been thriving over the last 3 years, I have not sought out conferences to attend. Where I cannot go back, I can only go forward, and DOMAINfest is the first of hopefully many.

If anyone reading is going to DOMAINfest please comment and I look forward to meeting you in person next week. Here’s to clear skies so my flight gets there on-time!

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As someone who has worked with computers and high-technology for 20 years and as a self-professed generalist, if there is something I can’t grasp, then I fear how tech novices will deal with it. Take digital subscriber line, or DSL, a lower-cost Internet access provided over a phone line by the legacy telephone companies like Verizon and AT&T.

Where DSL is more than sufficient for most Internet users, it has received a lot of negative attention, much of it fueled by the cable TV companies who offer much faster broadband cable service. One of DSL’s drawbacks is that the signal strength deminishes the further you are from the telephone central office in your community. To distance itself from these drawbacks, phone companies have rebranded DSL under different names.

Here’s where the confusion comes into play. Recently I helped 2 relatives get DSL, one from AT&T the other from Verizon. AT&T called its offering of DSL “Broadband Internet” and offered different speeds. I say “called” as when I went back to AT&T’s Web site to lookup the names for this blog post today, they are now calling it DSL! This must have changed at some point in the last 2 months. They call their 4 offerings Basic, Express, Pro and Elite. Originally the confusion was over the name “broadband” as compared to what the cable company was calling broadband. Now they have switched it to what I feel it should be, but this will mean I should make a pre-emptive call to one relative to tell them about the name change.

Verizon offers DSL as “High-Speed Internet” and uses the word broadband in its descriptive information. One of the few mentions of DSL comes in its FAQ when it is describing the Yahoo! software that is offered as an add-on to the DSL software installation. In the case of helping this relative with Verizon, she didn’t know of other Internet offerings, so no explaining to do.

Fortunately my Internet consulting firm Dunkirk Systems does not offer any products or services that need to have their name changed or attributes masked in order to sell them. Granted, much of what I do needs further explanation that their name themselves, and this is something we are very upfront with. Perhaps the DSL providers should band together to dispel rumors about DSL and call it what it is – a decent product for the masses.

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Please do not use the Network Solutions Web site to search for available domain names! If you do you may lose the ability to purchase the domain name - allow me to explain.

There are two extreme schools of thoughts on keeping customers. One is by providing an excellent product and service with a strong customer focus. The other is to lock in customers with restrictive practices and contracts, making it prohibitive for customers to leave or go elsewhere. In the competitive market of domain name registrations, Network Solutions (NS) is using the latter to get customers to register domain names with them.

When a person, company or entity desires to register a domain name or names, they search the WHOIS database which contains all registered domain names and registry information, including the owner, contacts and domain name servers among other data. If you do a search on the database for a particular name and it is not found, then the name is available to be registered new. Many domain name registrars and other third-party services offer a gateway to the WHOIS database. Unfortunately some of them track what names are searched upon and can use this information to register a domain name before the person searching on the name actually registers it themselves. This is called domain name front running, and though not technically illegal, it crosses many other ethical barriers.

Last week, it was reported by many domain name blogs and journals including Domain Name News and CircleID that NS was engaging in front running. If someone searched for a domain name on NS’s Web site and it was available to be registered, NS was actually registering the domain name and holding it for up to 4 days. You could proceed to buy it from NS for their inflated prices of $34.95, but you could not purchase it from any other registrar until it was released by NS. At first they were displaying a Web page saying the name was for sale, and this morphed into another form until not displaying anything for a domain name that has fallen prey to NS’s tactics.

I tried this myself last week and again today and they are still front running domain names. In my example I used the domain name thehotironisthebestestever.com – one that was never previously registered. Once I did so, I checked within minutes at DomainTools (a domain name search site that does not record searches) and GoDaddy.com and the domain name was listed as being registered to “This Domain is available at NetworkSolutions.com” and was unavailable, except if I searched for it and purchased it at NS. I did so again today, and you can see the WHOIS data on DomainTools.

As many people search on a domain name at one time and register it later, this causes great confusion, especially when NS’s site does not say they are committing front running and the domain name will be available in a few days. The bottom line is to avoid Network Solutions altogether – there are better WHOIS search interfaces such as DomainTools and other registrars that charge much less for domain names. Even for my own consulting business Dunkirk Systems, as we actively manage domain names for clients, we don’t charge that much either!

Though NS is one of the, if not the, oldest domain name registrar, they have lost touch with how domain name registrations cost and are handled today. Sure, they may gain some customers this way, but what's left of their reputation has been damaged and neutral opinions of them have shifted to negative.

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For the past couple of days my two blogs - The Hot Iron and sourcegate - were broken. You could bring up the main URL and see the home page, and if you clicked on any link you would get the very same home page. This happened midday on Tuesday as the hosting company "upgraded" something, causing previous patches to prevent this problem to reoccur.

I am pleased to say both blogs are working. Special thanks goes to Andy Knight who reached out to me after I posted this issue on the ExpressionEngine support forum. Today he sent me details of a fix he made and it worked for me as well. I posted the details of this fix on sourcegate.

Interestingly, over that time period my Feedburner subscribers increased by 5 readers! I'll look into that another time, as there's a little catch-up I need to do. And thanks to Andy, I have one less thing on my list.

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