I've done this before on slashdot, and once again I find myself doing the same thing.
When you register a domain name, it's not all about price, though a lot of people like to hammer on the very obvious fact that some of the more established companies (eg, network solutions) charge fees that are far in excess of other entities. You must also keep in mind that you are paying for a service - and look at what you plan on getting out of that service.
As a web hosting company, we register a lot of domains in a month. On top of that, we transfer many domains from other hosting companies to our servers. Since the vast majority of currently hosted domains are registered through network solutions, this is a very simple task for us. So long as we host a certain number of domains registered through them, we have a dedicated contact at netsol. What does this mean? If there are ANY problems with either a domain modification or registration request, there is a super nice woman at the other end of a telephone who is just sitting there waiting to help us out. She has the authority to correct about 99% of the problems that we encounter in our daily business. As a host this is one of the most difficult items we face on a daily basis, and this is an invaluable service.
The buyer's guide is a pretty nice site, but this is definately tailored to the individual domain buyer. However, at this point in time the individual is not the largest domain consumer -- it is still the ISP/IPP (even though we may do it on behalf of the individual). As such, what remains very important is the service that one can expect as a bulk buyer. While netsol continues to remain comepetitive and friendly to the bulk buyer (and they certainly have the resources to throw at this segment) they will continue to remain king.
(At least until we/other bulk registrants, get our act together and either use open srs or totally get ourselves going as our own registrar - either of which still require a rather serious investment on our part).
Sure - we always share our technical details with our users:
We have an OC-12 coming directly into our server room. This is a sonet ring -- bidrectional. If one ring fails, all traffic will run the other direction.
Off of that we run 2 T3's. One is a point-to-point T3 into the netaxs NOC provided by MFS. The other goes into Bell Atlantic's SMDS cloud which routes us straight into pennsauken (the second largest NAP on the east coast).
Most of our traffic goes straight through pennsauken. netaxs has direct T3's straight down to MAE-East, so any traffic headed that way will go through their NOC. If their NOC blows up, 100% of our traffic will route through pennsauken. Our router speaks BGP, and we have a hot spare available.
If there is some sort of critical failure in our data center, we have written contracts to relocate our servers into their NOC (about 3 blocks away) until we can get ours back in order.
In the 4+ years we've been serving web sites, that has worked out very well for us.
Would you have the extra cash if you charged what they did?
Probably not. Which is pretty poor business planning. We do have accounts that are $10/month for non-profit organizations. Makes us feel good to give a pricecut to organizations that want to get their word out but don't necessarily have the funds to do so. (It used to be free, but the abuse of that was through the roof.) If all of our customers paid that, we'd be out of business by the end of the year (our ISP bill is coming in shortly, to be followed by payroll). There are definate costs associated to running an internet service. Fees have to be apprioprate to cover those costs.
I was paying $10 a month. I could have paid $100 and gotten similar service but M$ based.
The gamut of what you can pay is enormous. You can pay us (shameless plug, sorry) $14.95 for a commercial account in a 100% linux environment. You can go to webhostlist.com or any of about 30 other hosting directories, listings, etc and find at least 1000 companies offering reasonable levels of service on unix machines for about $25/month.
Like I was saying in my other post, and many many people have said in this thread, something is not right with what happened. And I give masslinux no brownie points for offering cheap accounts on linux boxes. We do the same, as do literally hundreds of other companies. Yet somehow we've developed models to make it work.
-- Andrew Auderieth President Datarealm Internet Services
"The Internet service provider didn't give us any warning before they shut us off."
Does anyone have any information on who they were using for upstream? I could not conceive of any reputable provider simply pulling the plug without warning. Especially if there were known billing billing problems...
The other thing that I really don't get:
"Basically, what has happened is that they were deposited into an account that didn't belong to our Internet service provider"
There's only 2 things I can think of here:
1. Fraud. In which case it should be very easy to determine from whomever signed the checks, where they were going, and how they were able to get ahold of the checks in the first place.
2. A screwup on the part of the bank, where deposited monies were going to the wrong account. However, as they were getting deposited, the ISP would never have record of checks bouncing, and I'm assuming that before filling out deposit slips that they recording receiving payments from masslinux in their billing system. In which case this could have gone on for a crazy amount of time without them ever knowing.
Something is weird about this whole situation. And assuming that everything MassLinux reported to LinuxToday is accurate, there is one seriously shady ISP out there. -- Andrew Auderieth President Datarealm Internet Services
Interesting. The only reason I can see for this is that microsoft perceives that there is now a serious threat that a large number of consumers will be purchasing PC's preinstalled with alternative OS's, which even a couple months ago was next to impossible to conceive of. What I wonder is if this we will see any advertising campaigns targeted at these users to get them to dump their preinstalled OS and go with windows? microsoft does a lot of generic advertising right now, but not many (big time) companies do OS specific advertising. Sun kind of comes to mind, but like the mac they're looking to sell a whole system, not just an OS.
Did it work?? Finally, I have a guide getting my posts moderated up. It's amazing that it has taken so long for such a useful FAQ to be created on the internet.
All the news articles coming out about this seem to be focusing on x86 emulation, which I don't get. merced is almost on our doorsteps, and every day we hear about a new company who's OS is now booting on merced.
Now I don't think that the first iteration of merced is going to be widely adopted. But I think that the second will move it's way into the market extremely quickly and after that x86 is going to fade fairly rapidly. As transmeta has no products now, why would they position themselves to compete with a chip whose extinction is imminent?
Of course their babelchip will allow them to compete with any chip that they want, but my guess is merced will be their primary target. Perfect timing too -- let intel start building up the hype and get developers programming for the merced, and once manufacturers are about to jump onboard, step in with a solution for a fraction of intel's price.
The only thing that I can see that's changed here is that instead of being guranteed a minumum of $70/domain, NSI is now guranteed a minumum of $9/domain ($18 if a 2 year registration) and $10,000 per registrar so that they can get the API.
Now I realize that this does open up the possibility for price competition, which was one of the main points of all of this. But it also seems that one of the points was to kill NSI as a monopoly. If every single time a domain is registered, regardless of the registrar, NSI still gets a minumum of $9, I don't see that that has been effectively done. Heck -- NSI could sell domains for $8, a fee that no other registrar would be able to match, and still make money all the way around.
I really don't see how any of this can mean a thing until a 3rd party (ICANN would seem the obvious choice, execept for how much they appear to be bungling everything) maintains the central registry. I would even go so far as to say that there should be a not-for-profit entity created who exists solely to maintain the registry and does nothing else.
Without question hacking CGI is fair. In fact, two really big and very recent CGI blunders come to mind:
hotmail
network solution's dotcom mail
In neither instance were there any server breaches (that have been disclosed) but some really stupid CGI errors made the entire systems as they were intended to run wide open and completely vulnerable.
If this contest was meant to only test the OS, it should have been spelled out as such in the rules.
Slashdot Mirror
When you register a domain name, it's not all about price, though a lot of people like to hammer on the very obvious fact that some of the more established companies (eg, network solutions) charge fees that are far in excess of other entities. You must also keep in mind that you are paying for a service - and look at what you plan on getting out of that service.
As a web hosting company, we register a lot of domains in a month. On top of that, we transfer many domains from other hosting companies to our servers. Since the vast majority of currently hosted domains are registered through network solutions, this is a very simple task for us. So long as we host a certain number of domains registered through them, we have a dedicated contact at netsol. What does this mean? If there are ANY problems with either a domain modification or registration request, there is a super nice woman at the other end of a telephone who is just sitting there waiting to help us out. She has the authority to correct about 99% of the problems that we encounter in our daily business. As a host this is one of the most difficult items we face on a daily basis, and this is an invaluable service.
The buyer's guide is a pretty nice site, but this is definately tailored to the individual domain buyer. However, at this point in time the individual is not the largest domain consumer -- it is still the ISP/IPP (even though we may do it on behalf of the individual). As such, what remains very important is the service that one can expect as a bulk buyer. While netsol continues to remain comepetitive and friendly to the bulk buyer (and they certainly have the resources to throw at this segment) they will continue to remain king.
(At least until we/other bulk registrants, get our act together and either use open srs or totally get ourselves going as our own registrar - either of which still require a rather serious investment on our part).
We have an OC-12 coming directly into our server room. This is a sonet ring -- bidrectional. If one ring fails, all traffic will run the other direction.
Off of that we run 2 T3's. One is a point-to-point T3 into the netaxs NOC provided by MFS. The other goes into Bell Atlantic's SMDS cloud which routes us straight into pennsauken (the second largest NAP on the east coast).
Most of our traffic goes straight through pennsauken. netaxs has direct T3's straight down to MAE-East, so any traffic headed that way will go through their NOC. If their NOC blows up, 100% of our traffic will route through pennsauken. Our router speaks BGP, and we have a hot spare available.
If there is some sort of critical failure in our data center, we have written contracts to relocate our servers into their NOC (about 3 blocks away) until we can get ours back in order.
In the 4+ years we've been serving web sites, that has worked out very well for us.
--
Andrew Auderieth
Datarealm Internet Services
Probably not. Which is pretty poor business planning. We do have accounts that are $10/month for non-profit organizations. Makes us feel good to give a pricecut to organizations that want to get their word out but don't necessarily have the funds to do so. (It used to be free, but the abuse of that was through the roof.) If all of our customers paid that, we'd be out of business by the end of the year (our ISP bill is coming in shortly, to be followed by payroll). There are definate costs associated to running an internet service. Fees have to be apprioprate to cover those costs.
I was paying $10 a month. I could have paid $100 and gotten similar service but M$ based.
The gamut of what you can pay is enormous. You can pay us (shameless plug, sorry) $14.95 for a commercial account in a 100% linux environment. You can go to webhostlist.com or any of about 30 other hosting directories, listings, etc and find at least 1000 companies offering reasonable levels of service on unix machines for about $25/month.
Like I was saying in my other post, and many many people have said in this thread, something is not right with what happened. And I give masslinux no brownie points for offering cheap accounts on linux boxes. We do the same, as do literally hundreds of other companies. Yet somehow we've developed models to make it work.
--
Andrew Auderieth
President
Datarealm Internet Services
Does anyone have any information on who they were using for upstream? I could not conceive of any reputable provider simply pulling the plug without warning. Especially if there were known billing billing problems...
The other thing that I really don't get:
There's only 2 things I can think of here:
1. Fraud. In which case it should be very easy to determine from whomever signed the checks, where they were going, and how they were able to get ahold of the checks in the first place.
2. A screwup on the part of the bank, where deposited monies were going to the wrong account. However, as they were getting deposited, the ISP would never have record of checks bouncing, and I'm assuming that before filling out deposit slips that they recording receiving payments from masslinux in their billing system. In which case this could have gone on for a crazy amount of time without them ever knowing.
Something is weird about this whole situation. And assuming that everything MassLinux reported to LinuxToday is accurate, there is one seriously shady ISP out there. -- Andrew Auderieth President Datarealm Internet Services
Interesting. The only reason I can see for this is that microsoft perceives that there is now a serious threat that a large number of consumers will be purchasing PC's preinstalled with alternative OS's, which even a couple months ago was next to impossible to conceive of. What I wonder is if this we will see any advertising campaigns targeted at these users to get them to dump their preinstalled OS and go with windows? microsoft does a lot of generic advertising right now, but not many (big time) companies do OS specific advertising. Sun kind of comes to mind, but like the mac they're looking to sell a whole system, not just an OS.
Did it work?? Finally, I have a guide getting my posts moderated up. It's amazing that it has taken so long for such a useful FAQ to be created on the internet.
All the news articles coming out about this seem to be focusing on x86 emulation, which I don't get. merced is almost on our doorsteps, and every day we hear about a new company who's OS is now booting on merced.
Now I don't think that the first iteration of merced is going to be widely adopted. But I think that the second will move it's way into the market extremely quickly and after that x86 is going to fade fairly rapidly. As transmeta has no products now, why would they position themselves to compete with a chip whose extinction is imminent?
Of course their babelchip will allow them to compete with any chip that they want, but my guess is merced will be their primary target. Perfect timing too -- let intel start building up the hype and get developers programming for the merced, and once manufacturers are about to jump onboard, step in with a solution for a fraction of intel's price.
The registrar license agreement is laid out at:m ents/nsi-rla-28sept99.htm
http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/domainname/agree
Section 5 has all the fees.
Now I realize that this does open up the possibility for price competition, which was one of the main points of all of this. But it also seems that one of the points was to kill NSI as a monopoly. If every single time a domain is registered, regardless of the registrar, NSI still gets a minumum of $9, I don't see that that has been effectively done. Heck -- NSI could sell domains for $8, a fee that no other registrar would be able to match, and still make money all the way around.
I really don't see how any of this can mean a thing until a 3rd party (ICANN would seem the obvious choice, execept for how much they appear to be bungling everything) maintains the central registry. I would even go so far as to say that there should be a not-for-profit entity created who exists solely to maintain the registry and does nothing else.
In neither instance were there any server breaches (that have been disclosed) but some really stupid CGI errors made the entire systems as they were intended to run wide open and completely vulnerable.
If this contest was meant to only test the OS, it should have been spelled out as such in the rules.