One of my alter ego is running probably one of the biggest bargain sharing sites in Australia (working on it like 1-2 hours a day, hosted with none other than the great Linode serving 2.5-3 million pages a month). One of pages that I recently put it on is…

Cheap .au domain names — list of registrars and resellers offering .com.au for under AUD$30/2 years.

Registering a .com.au is a bit more complicated than registering a .com (which the only complicated part is finding a name that is still unregistered). With current registration policy polished by auDA, in order to register a .com.au or .net.au, you need to be:

• Australian registered company (an ACN), or
• Trading under an Australian registered business name (a state registered business number), or
• Australian partnership or sole trader (an ABN), or
• Foreign company licensed to trade in Australia (an ABRN), or
• Australian Registered Trade Mark owner (TM number), or
• etc

The easiest way as an individual is of course register an Australian Business Number (ABN) as a sole trader. It makes the tax return time a little bit more complicated as you need to file your business tax together with your personal tax, assuming you are not registered for GST and need to do BAS. Any more than that?! Hmm. Find an accountant.

Anway. Paying $20-$30 AUD for 2 years should be expected for a .com.au. Some might might want to sell you exactly the same thing for $140/2 years. It’s fine if you are billion dollar company existed before auDA opened up the registrar space and you are too lazy to change over. For the rest of us. Nah.

“Where is the cheapest place to register domains” has become an often asked question when you have more than a dozen domains in your portfolio. Through some forums posts I discovered EstDomains, an ICANN accredited registrar, that has everyday low price of USD$5.99/year on .com/.net/.org domains. That is actually selling below cost, as VeriSign, wholesaler of .com and .net TLD, charges $6 per domain per year, plus 22 cents extra for ICANN fees. How does EstDomains survive being a loss leader? Well, why should I care? — at least it is how you usually think when you spotted a bargain.

Moreover, it also provides you a free domain reseller platform that lets you sell their cheap domains with your own branding. Since I am also helping some of my friends out getting their domains registered, I thought I might as well sign up a reseller account. After all it is free, so nothing to loose, right?

“But something is not right”, I thought. Why there are so many GoDaddy coupon sites on-line, but EstDomains with its cheaper-than-everyone-else price is rarely mentioned? Maybe it has a bad reputation, as we all know even an accredited registrar can poo poo on you. So I went to the almighty Google for answers, and that has really lightened up my view on this registrar.

Just search for EstDomains at Security Cadets to see what I meant. They are not just the spammers’ registrar of choice because of their price. They actively sponsored those dodgy activities! Community reviews on AboutUs.org basically say:

These guys are registrars for known hackers and spammers. They should be sent to prison.

…

I’ve just spent ten minutes removing posts from a web site I monitor — all giving links to porn — and deleting the spammer. Ten minutes out of my life wasted having to clean up garbage partly because domain registrars like this don’t care who they sign up as long as they get their money.

Is there ever going to a way to make these owners and others like them accountable?

Moreover, I have seen forum add-on scripts that automatically check whether linked sites in comments are registered by EstDomains, and bin them automatically if it is the case. At the end, registering with these guys is not just financially contributing to the spammers and fraudsters, but also runs a risk of your sites being banned by online communities.

I guess I will stick with GoDaddy and NameCheap for a while.

Any way to prevent your registrar to do the same?

In the article Tips for Not Getting Screwed by Web Hosts, I discussed why it is a good idea to separate your domain and web hosting companies. However, what happen when it is your ICANN accredited registrar that is screwing you? RegisterFly has done it, and how do I know that shareholders in GoDaddy or Enom will not have fight and hold all their customers in ransom?

I know people should have pull the trigger and request for transfer when they started going downhill. However, how can you find out, as you do not go register/renew domains every single day, nor read domain name related forum for all the latest gossips?

Anyway. At least in the case of RegisterFly, ICANN stepped in and proposed a solution. Other registrars and web hosting companies are not slow in advertising their “refugee camp” package as well. GoDaddy is giving out a special package for them — $6.47 for transferring .COM and .NET, and GoDaddy is still receiving a nice 25 cent revenue from these transactions (assuming $6 wholesale price to Network Solutions).

On the other hand, DreamHost is much more generous. They are currently running a promotion for RegisterFly refugees, as posted on their blog, that if (1) your domain is currently registered with RegisterFly (2) you are a new customer to DreamHost, then with coupon code FLYAWAY you can get 1 year of domain registration + web hosting absolutely free.

Since many would have used those $97 promo code anyway, they are only paying $22.40 extra per new customer, who might not even use their hosting service. Sounds like great marketing to me.

The new site went live in mid-December, and it was quite a major update. Here are some that I have observed.

• A much better looking site. I wish I have some design skill.
• The whole site is yelling “Ajax! Ajax! Ajax!” at me. It uses prototype + script.aculo.us.
• Yahoo maps has been replaced by Google Maps.
• Many more functions are now built-in, like WHOIS, traceroute, etc, without going to a 3rd party site. You can still find links to other sites under the “other free tools” page.

Personally I have found it very useful in my research of web hosting companies. Most obvious use is, for example, for me to check where their servers are located, especially when I was researching Australian web hosting companies. Don’t be deceived by their ABN and .com.au domain name, their servers might be located in Dallas which would be 200+ ms away from Australian east coast.

I also often used lookupCrap.com to check out some of my first-time email correspondents, by greping the IP addresses from the RFC822 headers. Some of them do use Internet services from weird places :)

Most of the time, however, I was just exercising my bit of curiosity. “Where is this site hosted?” I have hacked up a small bookmarklet to assist me looking up the crap.

LookupCrap

If you are an Mozilla/Firefox/Camino user, just drag the above link to your links toolbar. If you are using IE6/IE7, you need to do a right-click on the above link, and then “Add to Favorite”. Haven’t tested on other browsers so YMMV. Now, clicking on that bookmarklet will open up a new window with http://lookupcrap.com/<hostname of current page>. That surely has made by crap-looking up easier.