Category: Domain Names

When you register a domain name, it’s an exciting time. You’re more than likely to be buying the domain for a new website you’re building. You’ve got a new project, a new direction, and you’re full of ideas. But its really important to remember that when you register a domain, you do so for only a certain period of time. The standard registration period for a .co.uk is 2 years, and for .com, .net and .org its often just 1 year.

Once you’ve registered your domain, you can do whatever you want with it: use it for your website address; point it at your website; use it for your email address. Whatever you want.

So what happens at the end of that registration period? Well if you do nothing, then the domain name falls out of your ownership and is returned to the ‘pool’ of unregistered domain names at the registry. So it’s really important to remember: if you continue to want that domain name, then you have to make sure you renew it before the registration period is over.

If the registration period finishes and you don’t remember to renew it, but decide you still want your domain, it’s not the end of the world. You can always re-register the domain, and – providing no-one else has registered it in the meantime – you get the domain back.  However there is a risk that someone might have jumped in there and registered it, especially if the domain name has a value. A domain name builds up value over time if you do certain things with it. For example, if your website starts to appear high in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), your domain name will have value simply due to the number of people who visit it. Or if your domain name is a close match to your brand or business name, it has a value because potential customers may type it directly into their address bar when trying to find your website. Visitors arriving through this method are called direct ‘type in’ traffic.

If a competitor gets hold of your domain name, they would benefit from getting all the visitors that would have arrived at your website though both the search engines and the direct ‘type in’ traffic. All of a sudden, the people who would have bought from you have the opportunity to buy from them instead.

So you can see that it’s important to make sure your domains are renewed so that no-one else gets a chance to register them. It can be so lucrative to register a domain that someone forgets to renew, that there’s even an industry sprung up around it. Its called ‘dropcatching’.

You might expect people with personal websites, or small businesses to not always renew their domain names. First of all, there’s the expense. There area large number of frequently used domain extensions (apart from .com, .net, .org there’s others like .info. me, and a whole bunch of popular country extensions too). And there’s also the variety of ways in which most company names can be written, as we discussed recently with the expensive domain ToysRus forked out for. It can therefore be an expensive business buying all your relevant domain names. And once you own quite a few, it can be hard to stay organised. The chances are your domains were registered at different times, maybe with different registrars, and for different periods of times. So its not surprising that occasionally domain names lapse without getting renewed.

But what about if you’re a big company? You’re organised, you have spreadsheets, you have budgets, and you have systems, so that your domains stay up to date, don’t you?

Well not in the recent case of Texas based ‘Silicon labs’, As first reported over on domain name wire, despite being a billion dollar company, they recently forgot to renew their domain ‘siliconlabs.com’. As soon as it became available, it was ‘dropcatched’ by an individual in Utah who registered it and then pointed the domain at a website full of adverts. This is another version of cyber squatting that we blogged about recently.

The company is now going through a domain arbitration process to recover the domain, but each day that goes by they lose money. And someone in Utah is making money out of that!

This shows the importance to having a ‘domain name management’ policy in place. For individuals and small business, make sure you have written down all the domains that you own; their renewal date; where you registered them. Make sure also that all of the emails from each registrar are set to go to you, rather than a variety of people in your business. Don’t rely on the domain registration company to remind you to renew.

One of the easiest way to manage your domains is to have them all in once place. You could choose WebEden for that, and transfer your domains to us. Don’t forget you get free email services with every domain.

So have you had any experiences of losing a domain name, or have you done some dropcatchng yourself? Leave us a comment below.

For a while now we’ve been giving away a free domain name with website builder packages. We’ve also made it possible for you to buy a domain name too.

It’s not always easy to find the right domain name for your website. If you’re a company, or a brand, or even a club for that matter, you want a domain name that’s close to your company name. For example, if you’re running a taxi company called Joe’s Taxis, then your ideal domain name would probably be:
joestaxis.co.uk
joestaxis.com

But what if when you’re looking for your domain, you find that someone has already registered it? If you suspect that they have registered it for financial gain at your expense, then you’re having an encounter with a ‘Cyber Squatter’.

Cyber squatting is the registering of domain names that would otherwise be used by companies or brands, that are a close match to that company’s name or brand. Cyber Squatters do this for financial gain. They can make money by placing adverts on the domain name’s website, or by directing visitors to that domain name towards a competitor website of the brand owner – for money of course!

There have been some high profile cases of cyber squatting over the years. Most recently, when Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch, cyber squatters quickly moved in and registered the domain bankofamericamerrilllynch.com before either bank could do so.

The domain name registries – the organisations that administer domain names – have policies in place to make sure that brand owners can legally recover their brand’s domain names. If brand owners can prove that the domain name has been registered by someone else in order for that person to gain financially from the brand value of that domain name, then they are legally able to recover it. However, the domain reconciliation processes take time and costs money. And due to the sheer number of ways you can write a domain name, and the number of domain extensions available (.com, .net, .org,. info, .biz, .me.uk; there are around 40 major ones), this can be a costly process for any brand owner.

The bad news is that Cyber squatting is on the up. As reported on the BBC, cyber-squatting went up last year by 18%. There were apparently 1,722,133 reported incidents. And the bad news for brand owners is that the study – by brand specialists MarkMonitor – also found that 80% of websites identified 12 months previously as “abusive” were still in existence today

Whilst this probably reflects poorly on the domain ownership resolution process of the registries, it also indicates that brands should get a lot tougher against people who are abusing their brand by buying and developing domain names that trade on their brand name.

And with so many ongoing cases – which are on the increase – it also shows that cyber squatting is obviously a lucrative business for those involved.

So what should you do if you are the victim of Cyber Squatting? Your first and best bet is to contact the current owner of the domain name and to politely ask them if they would sell you the domain name. If they don’t want to, or agree but want to charge more than a nominal fee (say £50), then you need to contact the relevant domain name registry and follow their domain ownership dispute process. The registry for .uk domain names is called Nominet, and here’s a link to their domain name ownership dispute forms.

Have any of you website builders been victims of cyber squatting? Or have you cheekily bought a domain name that you knew was benefiting from someone else’s brand equity? Leave us a comment below.

The domain name industry is gasping this week at the news that the domain Toys.com was sold at auction for an eye watering $5.1m.

As reported over on Techcrunch, the bidding went back and forwards for hours, but the eventual winner was High Street retailer ToysRus.

Of course many are asking: how can a domain name be worth that much to anyone? Lets look at why ToysRus went for it.

1. Getting the address bar traffic

First off, people navigate the web in different ways. As previously mentioned, many type the website address directly into a search engine. Lots of others do the exact reverse, and type a domain name directly into the address bar. So all those millions who are interested in toys and therefore type toys.com into the address bar will now be taken straight to the ToysRus website. If that equates to 1 million people, who each spend £10 at Toys.com, ToysRus will have recouped almost double their original investment.

2. Getting the Search Engine traffic

Those of you have read our search engine optimisation guide will be familiar with the factors that help your website appear high up in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for a particular keyword. One very important way to boost your position in the SERPs for a particular keyword is to have that keyword in your domain name. Now ToysRus can use the toys.com domain name, their opportunities to gain more highly relevant traffic from search engines are improved. A quick look at the Google keyword tool will tell you that there were over 300,000 searches for toys in February alone. Add up all the variations and there are ten times that. If the ToysRus can get just 10% more of this search traffic by using the Toys.com domain, its probably worth the money.

3. ToysRus is a (slightly) confusing name

We’ve all heard of Toys ‘R’ us – they’ve spent enough on television advertising over the years to make sure of that. But if we were all asked to search for their website, how many variations of their name spelling would we get? Here’s just a few that I can think of

Toys r us

toysrus

toys are us

toys ‘r’ us

At the moment these variations and thousands of others are opportunities for ToysRus competitors when it comes to search engine advertising. At the moment ToysRus need to make sure that they are top of the organic and sponsored listings on all the search engines for all the variations of their name. That’s quite a big job – and a big opportunity for competitors to get in and ‘steal’ that search engine traffic by appearing at no. 1 instead. Put it this way, if you wanted to buy a Thomas the Tank Engine model and you went to Google and typed in ‘thomas the tank engine toys are us’ and another website (website X) appeared in the top position for this search term (Toys are us), AND they had a Thomas the Tank Engine cheaper than ToysRus, who would you buy from?

Most people would carry on looking for the real ToysRus website, but a significant minority would by from Website X.

And if their shopping experience was good (the product was cheap, delivery was free and on time, customer service was clear) they might well look to buy from website X second time around. Maybe they buy 5 products a year… for 10 years… and tell 2 friends who do the same… You can see that pretty soon company X is reaping the rewards for getting their website to number 1 for the search term ‘toys are us’. And the money spent with company X is money that isn’t spent at ToysRus. Even though the person originally wanted to buy from ToysRus. The effort and expense of defending the ambiguous ToysRus name is huge.

4. Owning the Real Estate

At the moment in the offline world many turn to ToysRus when buying a toy. But for a variety of reasons (they don’t like the brand, the shops are too big, they’re often out of town) many don’t. If ToysRus can dominate the online toy buying market by effectively blending the ToysRus brand with the generic ‘toys.com’ domain, their dominance of Internet toy shopping may be even greater than their high street success. Only time will tell.

So you can see that $5.1m may be a small price for this particular domain name.

How much do you reckon yours is worth? Remember, you get a free domain with all max packages and above. If you’re inspired by the toys.com story then search for a domain name now!

This article first appeared over on Computer World last week.

If you’re an online marketer and you use AdWords to drive traffic to your website, it can be frustrating (and expensive) when your current customers click on your sponsored listing just to navigate to your website.

For example, lets say that you want to buy something from John Lewis, and you’re previously bought stuff from John Lewis before.

Do you go to your address bar and type in ‘http://www.johnlewis.com’ or do you go to Google and search for ‘john lewis’? If you do the latter, and you click on the ‘sponsored listing’ at the top of the page, then you’re costing John Lewis money. They have to pay Google a few pence each time someone clicks on their sponsored listing. These costs really mount up! A well known brand like John Lewis might get more than 10,000 clicks per day on their sponsored link from people who are just clicking as an easy way to navigate to the website, rather than genuinely searching for a product that John Lewis might stock.

In an ideal world, online marketers spend money on advertising to drive new customers to their websites, not current customers.

But if that’s a frustration here in the UK, just imagine how annoying it is in Japan. Over there, hardly anyone makes use of the address bar when navigating to a website, and almost always use a search engine, even when they know the exact web address of the site that they’re going to.

They continue to do this even when its a site that they use all the time. For example, many people in Japan have Yahoo as their homepage, and they like using Google to search for things. Rather than deleting ‘Yahoo.com’ out of their  address bar and writing ‘Google.com’, they search for ‘Google’ in the Yahoo search engine.

Last year there were so many people searching for Google in the Yahoo search  engine that the word ‘Google’ was the 4th most searched for term in Yahoo!

This preference for the search box rather than address bar is used by advertisers in Japan, At the end of TV or radio adverts, the user is invited to  search for their product using particular keywords. For print and outdoor adverts, a small picture of a search box with the keywords already inside it is usually printed on the bottom right hand corner, as a call to action.

The only time we’ve seen anything like that in the UK is in a recent advertising campaign by Orange, who invited users to search for ‘i am’.

The reason this is so common in Japan originates from the relative rarity of domain names (the bit that goes in the address bar) using Japanese characters. Early Japanese sites used English (Latin) letters instead. Its obviously a really long winded process for broadcasters to phonetically spell out the Latin characters of a domain name at the end of every advert. Just imagine a call to action for Webeden.co.uk. It would go something like this: ‘Visit duh-bul-yoo-ee-bee-ee-dee-ee-en-dot-coa-dot-yoo-kay’.

Thanks to this preference for using search engines to navigate the web, rather than the address bar, just imagine how much money the major search engines are making from people clicking on sponsored links for websites that they use every day!

Its not going be long however until domain names in Japanese characters become much more common. But now the search habit is so ingrained, will it ever change?

If you’re not clear yourself on the difference between a domain name, an address bar and a search engine then we’ll shortly be producing a ‘what is tutorial’ for browser basics.

In the meantime, feel free to search for a domain name to go with your Webeden website!

Here’s another tutorial. Now we’re starting to get into more advanced features -this time its how to buy a domain name. We’ve made our domain registration service easy to use – follow these steps and you won’t go wrong. Don’t forgot that the Standard package and above come with a free domain.

Good luck buying your domains!

If you’ve already bought a domain name from WebEden and want to point it at your WebEden website, then take a look at our video tutorial on how to point your domain name.

Ever wondered about how global warming is going to start to affect your life? Well I bet you didn’t think it would be this! The story first appeared back in November, and it is both amusing and scary, depending on your perspective.

There’s a small Polynesian island nation called Tuvalu, nestled deep and lonely in the south pacific. It has a population of around 10,000, and unless you were a local you probably hadn’t heard of it until 1999, where the country made some headlines in the domain name space.

This is because Tuvalu’s country domain extension is .tv. Verisign saw the money making potential of this domain and they cut a deal with the government there, whereby Verisign marketed and sold .tv domain names, and Tuvalu took a share of the profits. (OK, it wasn’t quite a simple as that, but that’s how things ended up).

Since then thousands have been registered – .tv domains have never been the most popular domain extensions, but are certainly well respected. Well known ones include the official Channel 5 website five.tv.

The thing about Tuvalu is that, well, its not very tall. Just 5 metres above sea level at its highest point. And the thing about sea levels is that, well, they’re set to rise. Maybe just a little, or maybe more. But if the highest point on the island is  5 metres, its easy to see that Tuvalu may not be around forever.

So what happens to .tv if Tuvalu sinks? Well ICANN, (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), who are responsible for all things domain related have a policy on the matter. They say that if a country ceases to exist, then so does its domain extension. Users will be given a reasonable length of time to transition to another domain extension, but ultimately that will be it for .tv domains.

You may think we’re a long way from that point, and of course ICANN policy may change. But if you’ve only got a .tv domain, it might be a good time to buy a domain with a different extension now!

Leave a comment below:

Back in September we had the exciting launch of our domain name registration service. As you probably know, all websites built using the webeden.co.uk system are automatically given a sub-domain of webeden.co.uk. Something like yourname.webeden.co.uk.

Before September, if you wanted to personalise your webeden.co.uk website with your own domain name, we sent you off to buy one from a domain name registrar. You then had to register your domain, and either point it or forward it to you webeden.co.uk website.

In September our domain name registration service launched, which meant that you could now register a domain name with Webeden.co.uk and automatically set it up with your webeden.co.uk website. In actual fact we gave your a free domain name with our Standard website builder packages, and upwards.

Since then, thousands of you have taken advantage of our domain name service. Which is great of course! But we’re wondering how many of you are getting the full benefit of what you get with your domain name? One of the great things about webeden.co.uk domain names is that they come with free email services for up to 5 people!

This means you can use the domain name you registered with Webeden.co.uk to send and receive email for free. So you can be you@yourdomain.co.uk rather than you@hotmail.com or you@yahoo.co.uk.

And what’s better, is that we enable you to do this for up to 5 people. So you can give away personalised email addresses to the other people involved with your website, or anyone else you choose. That might be colleagues or employees, friends, or family.

The best thing about using your free email service on your own domain is that it is entirely personalised and unique to you. You’re no longer one of the homogenous millions who are using the well known free email services, but you stand out from the crowd with your email address. By the way, its entirely free to use too!

And of course if you’re running a business, it makes it really easy for any customers or suppliers to remember your email address – its just you@yourdomain.co.uk, which of course is exactly the same domain name that you’re using for your website address.

If you’ve already registered your domain name elsewhere and want to take advantage of our free email service, you just need to transfer-in the domain to webeden.co.uk. Just go to our domain names page, type in your domain name and press ‘transfer’. You will also need to log into the control panel of the domain registrar where your domain is currently registered and change the IPSTAG to GANDI.

If you haven’t yet got a domain, then register a domain name now. Just click on the ‘domains’ tab and type in the domain name that you’d like to buy. You’ll then be able to use it as the web address of your webeden.co.uk website, and of course use it for the free email services.

The free email service can be set up and used via Webmail (where you access the email service through your webeden.co.uk control panel, similar to hotmail). This means you can send or receive your personal email from literally any computer connected to the Internet. In order to set up and access your webmail just go to webeden.co.uk, click on the domain name page, click ‘manage domains’ and you will see a list of your domains, along with a link to ‘set up and access your email’.

Or you can use a desktop client such as Outlook or Outlook express to send and receive email from your desktop. This is referred to as POP email. Here are all the details you need when setting up a new email account using your webeden domain name:

POP/IMAP Account
Server name : mail.gandi.net
Port : leave the default setting (110 for POP, 143 for IMAP, 995 for POP SSL, or 993 for IMAP SSL).
TLS or SSL : Yes
Username : your full e-mail address (including @yourdomain.tld)
Password : provide the password you had defined when creating your e-mail account

SMTP Account
Name server : mail.gandi.net
Port : 25, 465 (with SSL) or 587 (try one or the other)
TLS or SSL : yes
SMTP Authentication : yes, using the same settings as for the POP / IMAP account

For advanced users: each mailbox can have an unlimited number of names that go to the same mailbox, often called ‘aliases’. You can also set up email forwarding to another email address such as a hotmail or gmail account.

If all this makes sense to you, then start taking advantage of the free email service with your domain name. If you’d like any further help or advice, or just want to let us know how you’re using your free domain and free email services, then leave us a comment below.

There’s an interesting story over on Domain Name Wire today about a record breaking domain name sale which happened through the Sedo. Sedo is a secondary marketplace where you can buy or sell domain names. Its called ‘secondary’ because these are domain names that have already been registered, and their current owners are looking to sell them on at a profit.

Perhaps the best known sale of a domain on the secondary market was sex.com which generated $12m back in 2006. Prior to that, the heady days of the dotcom boom brought about the sale of business.com for a whopping $7.5m.

This time its the domain name Internet.eu, which went for $26,250, which makes it one of the top ten public .eu domain sales ever. There’s a perception that .eu domain names are worth a lot less than .com, .net or .org, and less too than country domains such as .uk. Still, considering the previous owner probably bought the domain for less than £50, that’s quite a big profit!

All this highlights the importance of choosing the right domain name. Its important to make sure you find something that’s easy to remember, but which is also relevant to you or your business. I’m bound to mention that you can get a free domain name with many of our website builder packages. This means that your WebEden website can appear as your domain name, rather than yourname.webeden.co.uk. Check out our domain name search to find one that’s relevant to you.

Of course if you’ve already got one, then its easy to transfer your domain name in. Just click on the transfer tab, enter your domain name and press transfer. You’ll need to change the IPSTAG to GANDI too.

Do you already own a great domain name? Why not make us envious and let us know what it is and how much you think its worth?