IDNs? Nah not for me, the search engines don’t like them

Continuing the Mythbusting series from here..

It’s fair to say there are not that many developed IDNs out there today. I wonder why that is?

My excuse has always been that I’m waiting for the search engines to treat IDN fairly.



Some of the myths I have heard:

an IDN can’t rank

Search engines can’t read punycode

Search engines don’t see the native keywords in a domain (because of punycode)

IDNs are not treated the same as “regular” domains, they are somehow penalised

I’m not sure exactly where I picked up this myth, but we can at least put this one to bed.

Google – Friend or Foe?

So what does Google think about IDNs, there are other search engines out there of course, but they are the worlds biggest, and they lead for others to follow..

Google Employee: …Content on IDNs can rank just as well as other domain names…

…Yes, Google does recognize the words within IDNs…

…We don’t treat them any differently…

Link to original article

Google doesn’t like IDNs? Busted!

If like me, you keep an eye on the whois of top domains, you’ll see all sorts of things happening under the radar.

One such recent event I am familiar with, involves these monster domains:

Chinese

照相机.com – Camera
汽车.com – Automobile
酒店.com – Hotels
首饰.com – Jewlery
黄页.com – Yellow Pages

Russian

игры.com – Games
музыка.com – Music
книги.com – Books
авто.com – Auto
квартиры.com – Apartments

This group of 10 top tier domains changed hands in an all cash deal in the high 6 figs recently (USD $xxx,xxx)

Too little?
Too much?

That’s for you to decide, but that’s the real world cost of acquiring the best of the best.
Just take a look again at that list above and consider the size of the keywords and the size of the target market.. mind boggling is what it is.

Unfortunately we can’t discuss exact prices, as it’s more than the buyer is willing to go public on, but we can take an exclusive peek inside the mind of the buyer.

I had the pleasure of meeting the investor in London a few months ago, just as this deal was being wrapped up, what’s interesting about this transaction, is that although the opportunity to partner and purchase a % was presented by a domainer, the investor himself was neither a “domainer” nor “end user”.

I see this becoming more and more typical as traditional investors are looking at non-traditional investment options.

While the buyer would like to retain a level of anonymity, I can certainly share that he is a 52 year old family man, with a Bachelor of Science in Hospitality Management from Florida International University.

I took the opportunity to fire some questions his way:

Q. Why do you see value in IDNs?
A. The value of domains (roman letters) are well established. It seems natural that countries with other languages will use domain names in their own language.

Q. Do you own any another domains?
A. Our group have more than a thousand domains but few are in the same category mentioned above, which I would call category killers.

Q. Do you think you comprehend the size of the domains you purchased?
A. Probably not, simply because of my conservative nature.
But as an example, if someone offered me 5 times what I paid for Hotels.com (in Chinese) I would refuse. In any other business such a statement would sound stupid to me.

Q. What are your plans for the domains?
A. Develop one or two domains hopefully with a strategic partner in that niche market.

If you are wondering how I fit into all this, well I am neither purchaser, vendor or broker. In fact my involvement in this transaction actually started a couple of years ago, when I made the initial vendor introduction in another big ticket unreported transaction that precluded this. Since then I guess you could say my role has been that of “confidant”.

.. still think nothing’s happening in the IDN world?

So what does this tell us?

Well, it tells us that Sedo have a huge reach – that we knew.
It also re-confirms that Sedo dominates not just the ccTLD space, but also the non-English space too.

You also might think that these sales we keep seeing tells us that the only interest in IDN, are German IDNs.. but you’d be wrong, this is very misleading.

You see, Sedo have a little problem, a problem that they have been telling people publicly will be fixed for over 5 years now.

Before we get into that, let’s take a look at Sedo’s mission statement.

…Sedo has experienced remarkable success establishing a global domain name marketplace… to continue extending the reach of our services regardless of language or location…Sedo’s top priorities have always focused on research and development…Sedo is positioned to continue its growth as a complete domain service provider with an internationally recognised brand…

Not sure what your take away from all that was, but I read:

• Global marketplace
• Regardless of language
• Top Priority is R&D

So why is it that if I try and list a Chinese language domain for sale, I get this message:

Maybe I would have more luck with Russian..

.. nope.

Ok, so Sedo can’t handle them… not quite the leading edge R&D powerhouse then.

Let’s get a little closer to home.

Last week on DNjournal along with the usual appearance of a few German IDNs sold through Sedo, I also noticed a few Czech language IDNs too (zájezdy.eu, práce.eu and dovolená.eu)

Hurrah! So Sedo can also handle the Czech language…

erm, no.

I tried to add this domain in earlier: tři, it means “three” in Czech, and guess what..

So in summary, Sedo’s globalness reaches as far as Germany plus half of the Czech Republic.

As I mentioned earlier, Sedo have been aware of this problem for years.
For over 5 years, various Sedo reps have turned up and shown their face at IDNforums, and each time given a promise that their “technical limitations” would be resolved, but alas, nothing.

In fact I jested earlier about Sedos mission statement referring to their top focus being research and development, and it has got me thinking, usually when a database or interface can’t handle IDN characters, it’s because it is not UTF-8 encoded, but somehow Sedo have achieved the impossible here, by UTF-8 encoding their systems so they can handle German special characters (and half of the Czech special characters), but none of the other characters that UTF-8 encoding allows. Quite incredible.

Summary

Yes this post has been somewhat of a bitch-slap for Sedo, but that’s what you get when you repeatedly make & break promises for 5 years, but I would like to wrap this up with two simple open questions for Sedo.

1. Are Sedo making so much money, that they and their shareholders don’t need the extra revenue from enabling the other half of the Czech language, plus the hundreds of other languages that IDN affords ?

2. Are you finally able to commit with any confidence when you will fix this “bug” ?

A link to this blog post has been emailed to Tim Schumacher CEO at Sedo; the IDN community is patiently awaiting your feedback.

Monetizing an IDN if you are not familiar with the language & culture can be an obstacle, but it doesn’t have to be.

If full scale development is your goal, then partnering with an existing business in that country makes a lot of sense.. you provide the name & traffic, they provide the platform.

And besides, development doesn’t have to be hard either, there’s a huge number of developers, graphic designers and content writers on sites such as Freelancer and Elance and the ironic thing is, from my experience, when I’ve put out jobs for regular English development projects, I’ve often received quotes from non-English contractors. i.e. Russians, Chinese..

If development doesn’t float your boat, then there are many parking and affiliate services out there that are IDN friendly.

Logging in to one of my accounts, I was greeted with this the other day, a below average Japanese IDN I picked up on a drop brought this recurring payment in via a single user, monetized through a Japanese affiliate site.

$42.50 thanks.

There are opportunities in IDN, because today it is still a niche area of domaining, and if you are prepared to also play in niche genres such as this, there are even more untapped opportunities.

Hard to monetize IDNs? Busted!

This is hopefully the first of a few articles in this series, where I attempt to un-mask some of the great unknown IDN domainers.

If like me, you have spent many hundreds of hours in the whois, you will have constantly run into the “Snow’s”. Their portfolio of IDNs is nothing short of legendary, and although I feel like I know them because I have bumped into them so many times, of course I don’t know them at all.

I make it my business to know most people in this business, but to-date for me, and I’m sure for most of us IDNers, the “Snow’s” have remained largely tight-lipped private people.

For the first time ever, Andrew Snow speaks candidly about his background, and the future of IDNs.

Q. GM: Anyone who has spent time in the whois will have seen the “Snow’s”, yet to many you are surrounded by mystery; what can you tell us about yourselves?
AS: No mystery really. The better half of the Snow’s is my college sweetheart and life companion for over three decades. Though we’re both from the U.S, we had met, travelled and have worked overseas and speak several languages. We have and enjoy a large family. My background includes law (attorney), business (MBA), and entrepreneurship (serial).

Q. GM: How and when did you first get involved with IDNs?
AS: In the mid nineties my wife and I were doing some charity work that entailed travel to orphanages in under-developed and emerging economies. At the same time the Internet was taking hold as a popular medium in the developed economies and the unprecedented impact of its digital revolution was coming into view.

I saw it as one of the most significant inventions in human history for it had the potential to change the equation that lies at the core of human progress itself. Innovation, the driver of progress, occurs when creative minds and knowledge cross-pollinate in a timely fashion.

Throughout human history the total pool of potential “pollinators” was a mere single-digit percentage of humanity. But now, the internet’s ability to deliver instant, dynamic, low-cost, and mass access to information and knowledge had the potential to dramatically change this equation’s numerator by multiplying the potential “pollinator” pool several fold in one or two generations – leading to a burst in innovative progress.

However, for many there was a road-block to the access ramps to the info-knowledge superhighway that was destined to eventually reach them, as these ramps – the domain name system- were designed and built for ASCII enabled travellers only. Since the jury had already delivered its verdict in the mid-nineties on the unprecedented potential and value of the digital real estate -domains- thru which this traffic was to flow, both the significant need and the opportunities in fixing these ramps were evident.

Q. GM: So what did you do?
AS: I began with some research into the DNS structure, Unicode, languages, Internet browsers, and other related issues. It became evident that any approach that mandated the insertion of anything but ASCII into the root was technically complicated and destined to be met with insurmountable resistance from those whose support would be needed for its implementation.

Another approach would be needed.
I then had the rather simple idea of utilizing, not changing, the existing DNS by way of piggybacking on the existing ASCII through adding an invisible layer that would function unseen to users and translate from non-ASCII to ASCII and reverse.

I devised an encoding scheme that was based on the location of a non-ASCII character in relation to a QWERTY keyboard, with workarounds for special character and language exceptions. (I took private lessons in several languages via a language school in order to deal with this).

I then wrote and filed a patent titled “Non-Roman Character Domain Names in the DNS”. In addition, utilizing an IE developer license, we built the first (I believe) IDN capable browser which we dubbed the I-Browser (Int’l Browser) The I-Browser was able to receive and display non-ASCII inputs, transparently translate them to a “gibberish” ASCII according to our integrated encoding scheme, and send an ASCII query to the DNS for site retrieval.

From the start, we envisioned a fully internationalized URL, and so the system and the I-Browser were designed to accommodate and demonstrate full IDN.IDN

We partitioned the operating system of a laptop to accommodate multiple language simulations, added character stickers to create a multi-lingual keyboard, loaded the I-Browser, and built (on their underlying ASCII gibberish domains) the first two IDN sites that were seamlessly and transparently retrieved to a computer via the DNS and with IDN.IDN displayed in its browser (one of our kids still uses this laptop).

The sites were of Russian and Hebrew IDNs in order to demonstrate both left to right and right to left system capabilities. IDN Trivia: those first two sites were игры.россия (games.russia) and פרחים.ישראל (flowers.israel). And yes, we thought IDN.IDN cctld’s should and would be first.

Q. GM: And then what happened?
AS: Several things. First, the market and Internet environment at the time were overwhelmingly Anglo-centric and thus not quite ripe. Second, I found that some of the most brilliant engineering minds can induce systemic inaction unless they envision perfected solutions to all aspects of a problem in advance. Third, and most important, as we followed developments I found that there were parallel efforts in several places around the globe that were working on solving this, including those that ultimately devised a superior encoding scheme (RACE) and those who were ultimately first granted a patent for an IDN system (Walid).

Since it became evident that only a system that went thru proper ICANN channels would survive, and as patents, encoding techniques, and browsers were never the planned profit centers for this project, when public IDN testbeds and launches were first announced – we were ready to participate and move forward.

Q. GM: Which languages have you invested in?
AS: We have a master list of keywords that we translated into three dozen languages and have invested in many.

Q. GM: What are some of your best IDNs?
AS: Well, they say beauty is in the eye of the beholder – but to me 美.com is truly “a thing of beauty” -as are the rest of our beauty.com domains in 30 languages.

Q. GM: Which languages do you favor most and why?
AS: Chinese for market scope, Cyrillics for inherent adaptability, and Hebrew for right to left issues.

Q. GM: A key part of the investment model for IDN dot com is the aliasing strategy. Can you share your thoughts on this, and how and when we might see it unfold, and your logic behind your thinking?
AS: First, I’d like to note that there are many Latin and Latin extended languages that include IDNs that are not dependent on this issue as they maintain there .com suffix. We have many of these in various languages that receive a significant amount of type in traffic in addition to their inherent and valuable SEO/development advantages, such as niños.com or crianças.com or even çocuklar.com (children.com in Spanish, Portuguese and Turkish).

As to your question, this is becoming increasingly moot. To me, this issue has always been near-moot for in my mind there was only one plausible outcome when all constituencies and realities were considered. The only unclear issue was exactly the amount of time it would take before this was to come to pass. I believed all along that we would see full IDN cctld first, and then some aliasing mechanism for gtlds together with some ICANN approved fee structure for its implementation. China helped a great deal by persistently pushing for IDN and then by being the first to officially alias IDN.ASCII to full IDN. Though it took a decade to complete, the whole event was to be played out as: Game (testbeds), Set (RACE to Punycode), Tie breaker (browser support) and MATCH (aliasing)

Q. GM: How would you explain the advantage of IDNs to someone who knows nothing about them?
AS: This week in Israel – where they mostly read, write and speak Hebrew – they’ll celebrate the “festival of lights”. So for quick holiday tips do they type in non-Hebrew: Hanukah.com, Hanukkah.com, or was that Chanukah.com – and who really knows? Would a business in the U.S. want to depend on the ability of its customers to remember its online brand or type its web address in, let’s say, Hebrew – to be able to be reached online?

Q. What do you think is the biggest risk facing IDN investing today?
AS: Just like the ASCII market: Investing later rather than sooner.

Q. GM: What advice would you give to domainers just starting out in IDN?
AS: Don’t fear other languages, and don’t forget that the “www.” stands for world-wide web. Otherwise, it’s 1998 all over again – and you know what to do.

Q. GM: What advice would you give to current IDNers?
AS: Remember that the true value of our “new” real estate is in its affinity, proximity, and attractivity to mindshare – the new location, location, location. And just as in the “old” real estate, the greatest value and purpose of location is – development, development, development.

GM: Thank you Andrew for taking the time to do this interview and Good Luck with all your online ventures.

Ever since I acquired IDNTools, there’s been a ton of things I wanted to do with it – relocate it to a fast server, give it a new skin, improve the toolset (particularly the IDN droplist), change the icons, new logo and so on.. I’m lucky, I have a great partner and a healthy budget, and it’s all coming soon.

But back to the free lunch..

I’ve been IDNing for years now, and I pretty much know what works well, what works kinda, and what sucks – and one thing that has frustrated me for a long time is the lack of an intuitive Punycode tool.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a bunch of them out there, but I haven’t found THE ONE.

Being able to convert native language domains to and from Punycode is the staple diet of any IDN domainer – lets face it, we find ourselves doing it many times a day.

For me the perfect Punycode tool needs to tick the following boxes:

• I want to be able to convert just 1 or many domains
• I want to be able to enter either a Unicode (native text) or a Punycode and have the tool just convert it the other way around
• I want to be able to enter terms with or without an extension
• I want to be able to easily copy the results (I don’t want to have to copy the original and converted just because it’s all in one table and then somehow work out how to separate the 2 columns
• I want to be able to quickly clear the selection and start over
• I want to be able to convert hundreds/thousands at a time
• I want it to be quick

..and I want it to be free


IDNTools is now running on a super fast server, and I think we now have the perfect Punycode tool. Built by IDNers for IDNers. Bookmark it.

IDNs? Nah not for me, I wouldn’t even know how to type one

Continuing the Mythbusting series from here..

I’ve lost count how many times I have heard folks say that they can’t get in to IDN because they don’t know the language; and the noobs that do, sometimes ask how do I change the language in my system so I can type them?





While I guess you could do it that way, but that sounds like way too much hard work to me – who wants to go to the trouble of trying to master a language just to type it in.

Enter stage left the IDN domainers 3 favorite keys on the keyboard.

Registering an IDN is a doddle

• Grab a reliable foreign language list of phrases
• Copy the term
• Paste the term into your favorite domain availability lookup tool

It’s sounds so simple doesn’t it, when you stop and think about it, but like I said you might be amazed how many domainers struggle to think outside the box on this one.





By the way, I’m on my 4th keyboard now, they all seem to meet the same fate



Need language skills to register IDNs? Busted!



]]> http://www.idndemystified.com/the-truth-about-language-skills.htm/feed 3 http://www.idndemystified.com/the-truth-about-cpc.htm http://www.idndemystified.com/the-truth-about-cpc.htm#comments Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:05:01 +0000 GM http://www.idndemystified.com/?p=1100

IDNs are worthless, the traffic is worthless.


Continuing the Mythbusting series from here..

One of the most common myths I hear is that international traffic is worthless, or at least not worth chasing.

While it’s true that many factors come into play to determine value, it certainly isn’t true that ALL international traffic is worthless.

I could write a long post and batter you into submission with a ton of facts and case studies and logic of why that is.. but sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.

The following chart represents some random keywords I ran through Googles Keyword tool




I picked 7 words/phrases in English and in Japanese and plotted the Average CPC according to Google.



This is a fascinating game to play, and when I have time I’ll run a similar exercise but comparing a group of languges side by side for the same keyword – but even with a small subset of data like this you can see how the story really unfolds.

Base data:




IDN/International traffic worthless? Busted!

]]> http://www.idndemystified.com/the-truth-about-cpc.htm/feed 2 http://www.idndemystified.com/the-truth-about-traffic.htm http://www.idndemystified.com/the-truth-about-traffic.htm#comments Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:36:16 +0000 GM http://www.idndemystified.com/?p=1057

IDNs are worthless, they don’t get any traffic.

I know people who are making $xxx a month parking a single IDN. And it won’t surprise you to hear that the type of quality needed to bring in that kind of traffic is exceptional.

Whether you subscribe to the IDN business case or not, it is kind of irrelevant – because there seems to be this universal law (regardless of language, IDN or not) that the very best keyword domains will always bring home the bacon.



And when I say very best. I don’t mean “premium” or “double premium” that you hear touted around too much these days, I mean keywords that would sit proud in the top 50 keywords Hall of Fame.

Getting the owners of these types of domains to come forward and go on record about their traffic/revenue is not easy – believe me I tried. Anyway.. nothing new here.. but that is not the point of this post, the point of this post is what about the rest?

I mean what can you buy for ~$2,000 or even reg fee – and what does that traffic look like today?

Notice the emphasis on the word TODAY.. it’s important because where we are right now in the IDN rollout programme, you would expect traffic to amount to a big fat zero.

and here’s why:

• Today not all browsers support IDN, although compatible browsers are now dominant in most countries
• Today virtually no one knows you can use IDNs – to clarify, ICANN seem to be more than a little embarrassed over their marathon 9 year IDN rollout programme, as thus far it has delivered nothing since November 2000, and you can see this in their literature, it seems to be more convenient for them to talk as if IDN’s of any kind don’t exist yet, and instead to paint a picture of a project that has been running only a year or so and will be delivering the first IDN extension into the root in the next few months
• In some countries domain names to date have been completely irrelevant due to there being little chance of them being remembered, and thus a complete absence of type-in

So that’s where IDN’s are at.

What would you expect from a parked IDN?

well, with most parking sites not indexed and the revenue from parking in the toilet these days, you would expect a big fat zero.

So by my crude calculations this all equates to zero + zero.

It is all this above that forms one of the pillars of investing in IDN, the assumption that some or all of these barriers will erode as publicity increases and the IDN machine gathers pace.

I picked some examples from my personal portfolio as examples of current traffic. As usual, this is 100% transparent, and anyone wishing to challenge me on these numbers is more than welcome to contact me and get some solid screenshots proof by return.

パソコン dot com. This domain is an abbreviation for Personal Computer in Japanese. PC dot com, if you like. Last month it recorded 146 impressions parked and delivered $12.67. Ads displayed are of course all related to PC stuff in one way or another, and it delivers approx the same each month.
I paid just over $2k for this at Snapnames and was reported in DNJ a few months back.

и dot com. This domain is a single Russian alphabet letter. I paid $xxx for this from a private seller and last month it recorded 5,320 impressions parked and delivered $5.56. This is not too surprising, as traffic to Russian domains is on the up since awareness in Russia is also on the up due to them being one of the first planning to insert their IDN cctld into the root. Click through is terrible as you can see by the low revenue, but I guess that’s to be expected as the domain is so generic.

What about buying for reg fee?

two more Russian IDN’s: егэ dot com (this acronym stands for a state entry exam for universities), 724 impressions last month delivering $6.85.
гипноз dot com (this translates to Hypnosis in Russian) 316 impressions delivering $5.56 last month. Both bought for reg fee ~$8

I could list a pile of these sorts of domains, all making their renewal fees, but the traffic prize today goes to adult domains, and I wish I was brave enough to list them here.

I could also write about fresh regged .jp domains, but I’ll keep that to myself for now.

The moral of this tale? The numbers above alone are not exciting, and in fact very typical, but they are what they are, and while no one will be retiring on them today, the real question is, how big a multiplier can you apply to these numbers when the barriers I mentioned above start to erode?

IDN/International traffic worthless? Busted!

]]> http://www.idndemystified.com/the-truth-about-traffic.htm/feed 1 http://www.idndemystified.com/portfolio-management-and-security-101.htm http://www.idndemystified.com/portfolio-management-and-security-101.htm#comments Fri, 14 Aug 2009 22:52:11 +0000 GM http://www.idndemystified.com/?p=917 Not a week goes by when there isn’t a story about a domain theft, it’s becoming an all too familiar sight, and just this week a colleague of mine lost many domains, some ascii, some IDN.

While it was this act that prompted me to write this blog post, I will refrain from going into detail about this specific case, as the criminal investigation is
ongoing – however, having a ring side seat as this story unfolded, I can at least draw some conclusions and weave it into some practical advice – so that you
can at least try to avoid being the next statistic.



Stealing a domain is not the same as stealing money from your bank account.

• The chances are that your bank account has much more security than your domain account
• The chances are that you would notice money missing from your bank account before you missed a domain
• The chances are that the authorities will not view a theft of digital assets such as domain names as seriously as they would theft of cash
• You might be surprised how unhelpful and unsympathetic your registrar is


If you genuinely own million dollar domains, then this article isn’t for you – you will probably have your own registrar.

This article is for everyone else, I am not a security expect and i’m not giving you blueprints to build your own Fort Knox – it’s about some simple, often free precautions you can take to make your domain assets just that little harder to take – not unlike the house in a street with a visible burglar alarm isn’t 100% safe because of that burglar alarm – it’s just the house next door is easier to ransack because it doesn’t have one.



My 6 Points

#1 – Keep a central list of what you own and at which registrar

There’s only one thing worse than being a victim, and that’s being a blind and clueless victim.

Believe it or not, a lot of people I know still rely on the registrar to tell them what they own.

They log in to their account and they see a list of domains, and they assume it is what it is.

But sometimes, that’s not how it is, firstly if someone steals a name, how will you know?
Secondly, most registrars UI that you are presented with has little or no relationship to the central registry. We’ve all seen Domainsite keep emailing you renewal reminders long after you transferred out to another registrar.
Heck, I have 2 domains that are with Moniker that I transferred there from Domainsite, and not only do I keep being reminded by Domainsite to renew them, they also still show in the Domainsite UI as being in my account there!

Another registrar I use for ccTLD’s, their UI is manually updated when you purchase a domain, on one occasion this was obvious as there was a typo in the domain they keyed into the UI that is presented to me, yet the domain was correctly registered.

From my experience, you simply cannot trust a lot of registrars to give you a 100% accurate view, and don’t get me started on DNS management.
Keep a list.



#2 – Get a bank statement

Your bank sends you a statement each month that you probably check to see if there’s anything unusual on it, so why not do the same with your domain account(s) ?

Be re-active not pro-active.
Being pro-active takes time. If you have a 1000 domains spread across ten different registrar accounts, how often should you log into each of the ten accounts and check everything is still there?
Whatever answer you said, it’s going to suck up a lot of your time, so it’s no surprise to hear that people don’t check regularly; and finding out that one of your domains went walk-about 3 months ago isn’t going to help much in it’s recovery.

A domain thief invariably has one goal and that’s to resell your domain asap, and as soon as that happens, life gets 100x more complicated for you.

I would suggest using a service like DomainTools domain monitor – it’s free, and works just fine for IDN’s.
You load in your domains, and as soon as a change is detected to owner, lock status, DNS – you get an email alert.
From my experience though the tools only monitors gTLD’s (com, net, org etc)



#3 – Your email account is not safe

Your email account associated with your domains, is like a key to a safety deposit box.

You might use a free email provider like Gmail or Yahoo!, you might have your own dedicated server hosting your own email.
You might have a strong password that is made up of numbers and letters that you keep in a safe buried in your basement, personally guarded by Jack Bauer.
It matters not.

Spend five minutes Googling and you will see there are more horror stories about hacked email accounts than you could ever read.
You should assume that anyone at anytime could access your email
With that in mind, your email account cannot be the first and last line of defence.

There are a few registrars now that are providing an extra layer of security, everything from USB keys to online security questions and phone call and ID pre-requisites. As I said, I’m no security expert, so I won’t even try to pass judgement on these solutions – all I will say is some security is better than no security, and relying solely on your email account is naive.

Personally I think it’s a bloody cheek the registrars charge for this. You wouldn’t expect a monthly charge from your bank for them to lock the vault each night – but today it is what it is.

Remember, it’s the whois record that dictates the legal owner of a domain, and it only takes 1 second to change that whois and push that domain to another account.



#4 – Use a decent registrar

The only criteria I ever see discussed, is how cheap are they?
This could be a huge topic, and not one I want to get into here, other than to say – you don’t pick a baby-sitter purely on them being the cheapest.



#5 – Keyloggers, traffic sniffers and all-round general cyber nasties

You know the drill – get a paid-for Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware, Anti-Malware & Firewall.



#6 – Arm yourself with some WMD

I’m not talking about the stuff world hiding champion Saddam hid so well – but Watch My Domains

I love this App. Again IDN friendly, load it up with all your domains, hit the button and it pulls back the whois record for each.

Makes life dead easy for keeping track of nameservers, owners, statuses and renewals. It even colors lines for names due renewal soon.
And if drop-catching or mining for new reg’s is your poison, then load it up with ten’s of thousands of terms and leave it running overnight.

There may be other better or cheaper products out there, but this one I fell in love with. Works with gTLD’s and most ccTLD’s, and their support team are top-notch.
If anyone is interested drop me a line and I’ll post more on this, as there are a couple of gotchas I’ve learnt.



$ummary:

#1 Keep a list – FREE
#2 Get notified – FREE
#3 Extra Level of Registrar security ~$150/year
#4 Use a registrar that prides itself on it’s security, they may be a few cents more expensive per renewal, so if you are price sensitive – just have your best names there
#5 Desktop security ~$100/year
#6 Portfolio software ~$50

If you cannot justify spending ~$300 to protect your portfolio from theft and your errors (dropping by mistake), then your portfolio simply cannot be worth what you thought it is.

Can you add to my list of 6, please leave a comment.

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