iWantMyName Domain Blog

A Domain For Chinese New Year

2012-01-25T23:00:00Z

This week sees the start of the Chinese or Lunar New Year with 2012 being a "most auspicious" year of the dragon. There's no denying that China remains an economic juggernaut and despite the uncertain global economic outlook, growth is expected to exceed 8% this year. So what is the best way for companies trading there to build a secure web profile?

There are two considerations for businesses wishing to set up a web presence in China or other Chinese speaking markets. Firstly, what are safe domains to use? The .cn domain is a well established domain with over 3 million (mostly domestic) users, but which is under the strict control of the government Information Ministry. We have chosen not to offer the .cn domain at this time.

Many companies outside China however are making use of the .asia domain which is a completely independent domain that became available in 2008 and has almost 200,000 registrants around the Asia-Pacific region. Because .asia is a relatively young registry, there remains the opportunity to secure some good quality domains. Another U.S. based registry that we recommend is the cn.com domain which we are currently offering at a huge discount.

The second consideration is language. Internationalized domain names (IDN) have arrived and you can now have your favorite domain in non-Latin scripts - example 幸运的红龙.com. IDNs are available across a limited (but growing) number of the most popular registries. If you have a non-English brand name that you wish to promote, this is a great way to go.

Blackout Sheds Light On SOPA Madness

2012-01-18T03:24:38Z

Led by major Internet sites such as Reddit and Wikipedia, January 18th is now shaping up as a major online protest event aimed at raising public awareness regarding the highly controversial Stop Online Piracy (SOPA) bill that is before the U.S. congress at present.

Enacting SOPA in its current form will undoubtedly have major implications for Internet companies globally. It could also potentially crush freedom and innovation on the Web through draconian measures designed to promote a "shoot first, ask questions later" approach to addressing content piracy. That is why we recently invited domain owners to Make A Move For Good away from fat cat companies that were backing SOPA.

The consumer backlash against SOPA stopped some of its corporate sponsors dead in their tracks, proving that Internet activism really can make a difference. But the war is not yet won. In fact it is feared that supporters of the bill such as media dinosaur Rupert Murdoch and his powerful friends in the motion picture industry are scrambling to mount an orchestrated counter-attack. It is important to show that we don't want an Internet censored by governments at the behest of corporate lobbyists.

You can show your support for the blackout in many ways. Firstly (and most importantly) blog about it and share opinions and discussion widely through social media as well as offline. Secondly, you may wish to add an image to your site supporting the protest. Our friends over at web optimizer Torbit have created a nifty Javascript popup that does exactly that. Be informed and keep on fighting.

Welcome 2012, And A Thank You To All Our Customers

2012-01-05T21:18:14Z

Wilkommen Bienvenido 欢迎光临 Kia Ora Velkommen Namastey Добро пожаловать Selamat Datang Bienvenue Welcome!

After a busy New Year period, iWantMyName welcomes all new customers and recent arrivals. 2011 ended with some political fireworks in the domain industry as the world's largest domain registrar attempted to recover from the crisis arising from its support of the misguided SOPA legislation. For many registrants it was the last straw after years of poor service and painful image blunders. The result was a flood of customers initiating domain transfers in protest.

As a relatively new player in the market (3 years now!) we were thrilled to see lots of enthusiastic testimonials flying around the Interwebs, with our existing customers heartily recommending iWantMyName to their friends. We even got a mention in Mashable's article detailing how to move your domains - a nice acknowledgement. So, thanks everyone for your continued support.

This year we've got big plans with new additions to our app marketplace, improvements to domain search functionality and some feature redesigns as we look towards the introduction of new generic top level domains. Onwards and upwards into 2012!

A Helping Hand For Domain Transfers

2011-12-29T02:05:24Z

So you've decided to join the movement against your old fashioned, SOPA-loving (or not loving, or maybe loving), redneck domain registrar — but are not quite sure how to transfer your precious domains. Never fear, we've created a special automatic domain transfer service just for you. iWantMyName aims to make domain management painless, simply fill out the form and let us deal with all the messy details.

Unfortunately transferring a domain from one registrar to another is not always a straightforward exercise. However, our team of industry veterans are expert in untangling red tape and solving life's little administrative problems. Provided you are willing to supply us with access to your existing account, we can handle everything for you. That leaves you more time to spend enjoying your holidays!

What can we do for you? First we will send you a quote for the cost of transfer (you get a 12 month extension with each transfer). Once you agree to the quote, we contact your existing registrar and gain all the required codes and permissions to make the transfer of your domains. Of course we will also migrate any DNS settings, so you get a completely seamless changeover. We've included a detailed FAQ on our domain transfer page in case you have any questions or concerns.

Remember, at iWantMyName we will never try to up-sell you with stuff you don't need, plus we make domain and DNS management a breeze with our clean dashboard and simple one-click DNS set-up on your favourite hosted apps. Want to find out more? Here are some testimonials from our many happy customers. Welcome to the movement!

Make A Move For Good

2011-12-24T00:59:00Z

We're starting a movement and here's why.

Recently you may have become aware of a list of corporations that are supporting the so called SOPA legislation. SOPA proposes much stronger responses for countering illicit trade in intellectual property, including far reaching measures that could impact a wide range of online service providers and indeed disrupt the safety and trust within the entire domain name system. We've been following the debate around SOPA from here in New Zealand, because it also potentially impacts on global Internet companies like ours.

Artists, developers and other creatives certainly have a right to be fairly remunerated for their work. But the SOPA legislation, in its current form, has huge negative implications for digital innovation and personal freedoms globally. The Internet evolved largely on the basis of trust and openness and we get nervous when governments and corporations make up more rules that threaten those freedoms. If 2011 taught us nothing else, it was that the Internet has become the global vanguard of social democracy and a force for good. Let's not give up those rights without a struggle!

A lot of good people are voting with their feet now and saying hey we don't want to support big companies that are against Internet freedom. It's hard to believe that any company would undermine the very industry that it purports to enable - but it seems to be the case. So if you have strong views on this topic and you are thinking of transferring your domain portfolio to a company that respects Internet freedom and opposes censorship, we'd love to hear from you.

Update: In case you need a hand making a domain transfer, we've set up a free domain concierge service to alleviate any hassles.

A Christmas Cracker

2011-12-15T18:41:33Z

It's hard to believe that 2011 is already drawing to a close and even if you don't celebrate Christmas in your household, you are probably finding yourself swept up in the "spirit of Christmas" as we stumble headlong towards the holidays. Here's some digital gift giving solutions to make your Christmas go off with a bang.

Studies have shown that kids spend 96% of their waking hours bug eyed in front of a computer screen these days, so base your gift purchasing decisions around feeding their online addiction. You'll instantly become their favorite aunt/uncle whilst saving your shoe leather from miles of exhausting mall marching. SmallWorlds and Minimonos are fantastic, safe browser based games that have millions of teenage players globally. Set up a funky game character and drop some credits on the account for in-game purchasing of digital merchandise. For young readers and learners, check out 8Interactive's outstanding talking books on both iOS and Android. Great distractions for long car trips and waiting at the doctor for inoculations.

For adult friends and family what could be more personal than a new domain name managed right here at iWantMyName? Traditionally, most new family blogs are set up over the holidays when Mom & Dad are busy snapping photographs. So it's a great time to give away a domain name Christmas present. Got friends or family setting up a small business? Grab an appropriately branded domain and get them set up online with all the best business apps. Remember we offer almost 100 different domain extensions to choose from and easy one-click DNS setup for the best hosted apps.

After the gifts are revealed and everyone's feeling a little fatigued from too much egg nog and brandy infused Christmas pudding, grab your favorite web device and escape to a quiet spot for some online Christmas entertainment. We heartily recommend Gizmodo for irreverent (and sometimes mildly disturbing) holiday reading for geeks. Gizmodo is the home of the Lego Yoda Santa, so it must be cool.

Have a safe and happy festive season everyone!

New, Faster Domain Search

2011-12-12T21:21:42Z

We're excited to release a new version of the iWantMyName domain search today. During 2011 we've been paying a lot of attention to all the great feedback we've been getting from you about our service. Over the last few weeks we've worked really hard to implement some new ideas on the site that we think you'll love.

With almost 100 different domain extensions on offer, the main focus has been on improving speed and more efficiently displaying the search results on a single page. We've also added several different optional display filters such as categories and domain availability:

It's now also easier to search for two-letter domain names as we will only show TLDs supporting these little goodies.

The new search currently runs in public beta mode, so please let us know if you run into any issues via our support center. We're looking forward to your feedback!

The Domain Name Year 2011 In Review

2011-12-07T19:53:33Z

With the end of the year rapidly approaching, it's timely to now look back on the events that defined the domain name industry in 2011. What a year it has been, notably with the approval of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs). The long anticipated new domains will bring a flood of choices for naming your home on the web and an increasing need for next generation domain management tools and practices.

Here are our domain industry highlights for you:

1. New Generic Top-Level Domains

Internet regulatory body ICANN, concluded a lengthy history of internal debate and negotiation with multiple stakeholders that began with its formation in 1998. The organization unleashed approval to allow anybody to apply for a top-level domain. The historic move opens the doors to specifically branded domains, such as .ibm or .bmw, as well as new domains aimed at more general verticals, such as .hotel or .sport. There are also moves afoot to create domain brands for geographic regions, such as .berlin and .nyc. The application window begins January 2012, but industry observers predict that it may be 2013 before the first new domains roll off the production line. It is anticipated that the new offerings will encompass internationalised domain name (IDN) facilities, incorporating non-Latin scripts from day one.

2. Rising Popularity of Internationalized Country Domain Extensions

2011 saw a marked rise in the adoption of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) across the globe; a trend likely to be accelerated as new top level domains begin to emerge. Registries from countries embracing a diversity of ethnicity and languages have been quick to become involved, with a total of 29 country code domains having been evaluated by ICANN. Malaysia has been the most recently added, enabling fuller representation of Internet names across a nation of four different official languages and numerous regional dialects. Russia operates one of the most successful domains achieving over 800,000 registrations of Cyrillic domains on the transliterated .ru country code. More recently the Russians achieved dual listing status with the launch of the top level national domain .PФ (Российская Федерация).

You can buy this IDN map from Byte Level Research

3. .COM Reaching 100 Million Registered Names (almost)

Are we there yet? The familiar and reliable .COM domain has been around 26 years and is by far the most popular domain with nearly half of all global registrations. Whilst Planet Earth clocked up its 7 billionth citizen in 2011, .COM is expected to attain 100 million unique domains around about the end of the year (give or take a week). It is almost unbelievable to think that this plucky little generic top level domain (gTLD) had less than 10,000 registrants back in 1995, but has now become the standard for almost every business, blogger or home user on the net.

Source: Registrar Stats TLD Domain Counts

4. Domain Name Sales Still Going Strong

Domainers, traders and domain real estate investors had a buoyant 2011, despite perturbations in the global economy. It seems some domains appreciate in value (a lot!). But the trick of course is to figure out which ones. In a year which saw both a Facebook movie and a staggering IPO by business network LinkedIn, it came as no surprise to see social.com change hands for a cool $2.6 million. The arrival of new gTLDs will no doubt stimulate and expand the market for highly sought after domains.

Source: DN Journal's 2011 YTD Top 100 Sales Chart

What were your highlights for 2011? We'd love to hear them in the comments.

Saucy Thanksgiving Holiday Domain Deals

2011-11-24T16:55:44Z

Right about now, turkeys all across the nation are getting very nervous as earnest Moms and Dads prepare for family homecomings and reunions. In the same way that cranberry sauce adds spice to your favourite Thanksgiving feast, we've added some flavorsome domain deals for the holiday weekend — valid until Cyber Monday at midnight.

Top of the hit parade are ten buck bargains on all .COM / .NET / .ORG / .INFO domains. Make a pilgrimage to iWantMyName for these $10 domains and we will even throw in free whois masking (in case you don't want your folks checking up on you).

If that wasn't enough, we are also making a meal out of some of the best country code top level domains (TLDs).Check out .ME / .AT / .BE / .IN domains. These turkeys are flying out the door at a "poultry" $10 a pop and are perfect for knocking off cool domain hacks. Still hungry? For dessert we are offering delicious .IO domains. Gobble these up for only $70. That's a saving of $29 off the regular price.

But wait, that's not all! You may not get a free set of carving knives, but we can direct you to a wonderful offer by our friends over at Squarespace who provide one of the most highly regarded fully domain customizable website builders on the web. Just quote the coupon code TURKEY30 and you will be getting a satisfying 30% off your purchase.

And, to all our American customers, have a great Thanksgiving and travel safe!

9 New Marketplace Apps For Your Domains

2011-11-24T03:03:13Z

Today we're showcasing you some new app additions to the iWantMyName marketplace which helps you finding and setting up the best web services to host your domain names. Here we go:

Centrally — Create a website for your business from different social media profiles around the web.

Onepager — Website builder tool to create simple one-page sites for small businesses.

LetsEat — Easy restaurant sitebuilder for designing, hosting and managing your website online.

Harmony — Powerful website management service connecting developers with content editors.

LightCMS — Website CMS and online store manager for designers offering complete design control.

Reddit — Customize your Reddit URL and access your community through your own domain name

dotCloud — Build, deploy and manage applications in the cloud on your favorite software stack.

SupaDupa — Everything you need to run a successful online shop business and sell products on the web.

Atmio — Easily create, target, test and optimize mobile landing pages on your own domain name.

All listed apps and services can now be easily added to your domains in just one click.

.CO, .MOBI, .LV, .LI & .PL Domains Now Permanently Reduced In Price

2011-11-17T03:48:30Z

As of today, we have slashed our prices for the following domain extensions:

International domains (including free whois address masking)

.CO domains: $34.90 => $33
.MOBI domains: $29 => $25

Also, we now offer a 10% discount on .CO domain transfers.

Country code top-level domains

.LV domains: $80 => $40
.LI domains: $49 => $35
.PL domains: $39 => $35

Making quality domain name management simple and affordable. That's our mission at iWantMyName!

Dashboard Updates: Improved Heroku DNS Setup, Notes & Marketplace Search

2011-11-12T00:27:13Z

This week we've been working on improving our dashboard in response to great feedback you have given us during Startup Weekend Wellington.

Ability to add notes for a domain

You can now add free-form notes to any of your domains with additional information. Fill in whatever you want, e.g your girlfriend's birthday (you can never have enough reminders), links to external services (you can use basic HTML) or hosting-related information:

Marketplace App search

With almost 100 entries in the iWantMyName marketplace, it has become increasingly more difficult to find the app or service you're looking for. The new marketplace search will help you to set up domains even faster from your dashboard now:

Choose your Heroku application stack

When setting up custom domains for Heroku, there's now a drop-down menu that let's you choose whether you're using the Cedar or Aspen / Bamboo stack. This will add the necessary CNAME and A record DNS settings for your app on Heroku automatically:

There's more to come in November, you should especially keep an eye on our domain search.

Introducing Free Whois Address Masking To Protect Your Privacy

2011-10-26T01:08:41Z

Domain privacy has been a long-awaited feature at iWantMyName and we're happy to now give you an option to mask your home address in the public whois record without giving up ownership or transfer control. The service is free of charge and can be easily added to your domains from the iWantMyName dashboard.

For those of you who don't know, domain registrations require your contact information to be provided for storage and display in the international whois database. This means that anyone in the world can view your address and phone number without restriction.

We appreciate that some of you may not want this due to obvious privacy reasons such as identity theft, fraud or stalking. By using our free whois protection, individuals can hide their address details (street, city and phone number) from unwanted eyes for the following domain extensions:

gTLDs (generic top-level domains)
.COM, .NET, .ORG, .BIZ, .INFO, .MOBI, .NAME
ccTLDs (country code top-level domains)
.CC, .LA, .TV, .FM, .ME, .AG, .BZ, .LC, .MN, .SC, .VC, .CO, .SO

After enabling whois masking for one of your domains, you will still be the legal owner (registrant) and have access to all email addresses should you want to move to a different registrar.

Unprotected whois vs. protected whois entry

If you need more information, we've got a detailed whois privacy FAQ in our knowledge base.

Six Revisions Promotes Site Builder Trial

2011-10-12T03:01:16Z

In an inspired multi-media match, popular web design and development blog site Six Revisions has teamed up with one of our favourite apps Squarespace to offer a one year free account subscription for three lucky users.

Six Revisions engages writers, who are also developers and designers in real life, to thoughtfully craft comprehensive articles across a wide spectrum of topics on web development. Squarespace provides an outstanding hosted website builder application that has sky-rocketed in popularity these last few years. In fact Squarespace was one of the first apps that we implemented, allowing easy one-click set-up of a Squarespace site on your chosen domain name.

The evolution of Squarespace is an interesting one that somewhat mirrors our own, having also begun life bootstrapped from a suburban bedroom. Despite advice to the contrary, Squarespace moved very early to distance itself from advertising based revenue. Founder Anthony Casalena soon realised that customers would pay for excellence, so consequently focused on building an easy-to-use interface that allowed people to have fun building cool websites for themselves. By 2009 Squarespace found itself on the Inc. magazine Fast 500 list and was soon attracting the attention of some seriously influential investors.

Squarespace offers a trial account, so users can play and check out the service without obligation. But the Six Revisions offer extends to a full service subscription for a whole year. Simply add a comment to the Six Revisions blog article explaining why you'd love a free Squarespace account. The competition closes on October 18th.

SEO Advantages Of Your Own Video Site

2011-10-07T16:01:05Z

Guest Post by Ray Pawulich, VidCaster.com:

At VidCaster, we give our users the tools to build their own video site. We focus on making this process as easy and painless as possible, but also loaded with advanced features that help you maximize your ROI from online video publishing. One of these features is video SEO that "just works" right out of the box.

The Key to Video SEO: The Video Sitemap

As the name implies, video SEO is a subcategory of SEO (search engine optimization) focused on video. Unlike text-based content, video content is not inherently indexable by search engine crawlers. Just uploading a video file to your web-server is not enough for today's search engines to index that content as a video — if you want your content to come up when a user does a video search, you need to provide search engines with something called a "video sitemap".

Prior to the advent of tools like VidCaster, creating a video sitemap was a complicated, manual process. To make matters worse, search engines are constantly changing their desired format for a video sitemap, forcing you to stay on top of those changes and update your video sitemap yourself — not a great proposition if your goal is to focus on creating & promoting your content.

The end result of this way of doing things is that the vast majority of videos search results are driving traffic to video sharing sites like Vimeo and YouTube — not the sites of the creators of that content!

Luckily, VidCaster has revolutionized the creation of the video sitemap by making it automatic and invisible to the user, allowing video publishers to drive traffic to their own site without any additional effort.

Video SEO at Work

Let's take a look at an example of how Hackers and Founders, a current VidCaster client, is leveraging video SEO.

Because their video site is set up at hackersandfounders.tv (which means their brand name is right there in the URL), if we search for "Hackers and Founders" in Google, right on the first page of results we see a video coming from their site:

Not only is this the only video result shown on the page, but as an individual searching that brand name, I instantly know from the URL that this is official content coming directly from that brand — not user-generated content on a video-sharing site.

If we click through, we are taken to a landing page on that site:

Note that all the related videos are videos from Hackers & Founders — there is no way that the viewer can get lost to someone else's video. Try doing that on a video-sharing site!

By presenting the video in an environment over which they have full control, Hackers and Founders gives themselves the opportunity to use their video content to further a business goal — which, in this case, is to drive traffic toward their sponsor, Microsoft BizSpark. As you can see, they're doing though VidCaster's in-player call-to-action capabilities as well as with a traditional banner ad on the site (something that's also not possible on traditional video-sharing sites).

Advanced video SEO: leveraging the video site

For SEO experts, the concept of their own "video site" opens up many possibilities for boosting the organic ranking of not only their video site, but their main site as well. This is because, whether you have your video site set up on its own domain (such as hackersandfounders.tv) or as a subdomain (such as tv.airbnb.com), search engines will consider your video site wholly separate from your main site — even though you control both! This allows to strategically use cross-linking between the two in order to share the "SEO juice" one site might get to rank the other site higher for particular search terms.

Now even easier

Video SEO is a new and interesting space and VidCaster is proud to apply our "it just works" philosophy to this category. That's why we're also proud to announce a new partnership with iWantMyName — now if you use iWantMyName for domain name management, our service can be easily added to your domains with just one single click.

For more information about VidCaster, please visit www.vidcaster.com.