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eNom down. 10m sites affected. Here's how to fixAdrian Singer, January 31 |
eNom, the second largest domain registrar in the world, went down today - Saturday January 31, 2009, at around 3:30pm EST and has been down for the last 3 hours.
At least 10 million domains have been affected by this outage.
From the blogosphere
Reports have been popping all over the blogosphere and twitter -
What does this mean?
When your domain registrar is down, no users are going to be able to access your site, unless they know your site's IP address.
Your registrar's domain servers are charged with converting YOURDOMAIN.com to an ip address your browser can connect to.
eNom has 5 distributed domain name servers. The idea is that if one DNS server is down, the others pick up.
Unfortunately as of this writing - all 5 eNom DNS servers are down.
A better domain registrar?
eNom's tag line is "The most reliable DNS array in the industry".
Strange as it may seem, this statement may still hold true.
eNom is great. We've been fans of eNom for the past 5 years.
We also have domains with GoDaddy and NTT/Verio. If you pull-up uptime reports for the three registrars, you'll find that over the last two years, every single one experienced some form of outage with their DNS servers.
Bottom line is - no matter how big you are, "shit happens".
Hard drives die. Servers crash. And routers stop routing.
The solution is not looking for "a better" hosting company / domain registrar / server platform etc. Everything crashes eventually. The real solution is acknowledging things will fail and planning accordingly.
Avoid website outages
To avoid your website going down when something like this happens, you need to avoid any single point of failure.
Here at SPI, whenever we do web hosting, we use a multi homed architecture, where your site is replicated across at least two separate ISPs.
On the DNS level, we recommend using secondary domain registrars for all client domains. Yes - you can have your domain name setup with more than a single DNS service.
Michel wrote a step-by-step how to setup a secondary domain server guide, last September.
Contact us today and we'll gladly help you set this up for your website / domain, so that you avoid any single point of failure and stay up, no matter what happens.
At least 10 million domains have been affected by this outage.
From the blogosphere
Reports have been popping all over the blogosphere and twitter -
What does this mean?
When your domain registrar is down, no users are going to be able to access your site, unless they know your site's IP address.
Your registrar's domain servers are charged with converting YOURDOMAIN.com to an ip address your browser can connect to.
eNom has 5 distributed domain name servers. The idea is that if one DNS server is down, the others pick up.
Unfortunately as of this writing - all 5 eNom DNS servers are down.
A better domain registrar?
eNom's tag line is "The most reliable DNS array in the industry".
Strange as it may seem, this statement may still hold true.
eNom is great. We've been fans of eNom for the past 5 years.
We also have domains with GoDaddy and NTT/Verio. If you pull-up uptime reports for the three registrars, you'll find that over the last two years, every single one experienced some form of outage with their DNS servers.
Bottom line is - no matter how big you are, "shit happens".
Hard drives die. Servers crash. And routers stop routing.
The solution is not looking for "a better" hosting company / domain registrar / server platform etc. Everything crashes eventually. The real solution is acknowledging things will fail and planning accordingly.
Avoid website outages
To avoid your website going down when something like this happens, you need to avoid any single point of failure.
Here at SPI, whenever we do web hosting, we use a multi homed architecture, where your site is replicated across at least two separate ISPs.
On the DNS level, we recommend using secondary domain registrars for all client domains. Yes - you can have your domain name setup with more than a single DNS service.
Michel wrote a step-by-step how to setup a secondary domain server guide, last September.
Contact us today and we'll gladly help you set this up for your website / domain, so that you avoid any single point of failure and stay up, no matter what happens.
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Google AdWords $250 Free Coupon!Dawn Rossi, January 16 |
Get $250 in Free Clicks from Google AdWords
Go To: http://www.google.com/ads/250/v.html
No need to enter any promotional code
* Offer valid for new accounts only while supply lasts
View 1 Comment(s)
Go To: http://www.google.com/ads/250/v.html
No need to enter any promotional code
* Offer valid for new accounts only while supply lasts
View 1 Comment(s)
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Marketing Tactics in the Economic DownturnAdrian Singer, January 8 |
Interesting report released by MarketingSherpa, shows where advertising budgets are going during this Economic Downturn:
Their findings correspond to what we're seeing here at SPI.
More clients are turning to Email Marketing and PPC, giving up on old school marketing, where ROIs are going down and you have no ability to quickly split test, measure, tweak and test again.
Their findings correspond to what we're seeing here at SPI.
More clients are turning to Email Marketing and PPC, giving up on old school marketing, where ROIs are going down and you have no ability to quickly split test, measure, tweak and test again.
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AdWords Editor 7.0 ReleasedDawn Rossi, December 19, 2008 |
This week Google released AdWords Editor 7.0 for the Windows and Mac.
AdWords Editor allows you to quickly make changes to your PPC account, without having to login to the Adwords website.
New features in this release:
* First page bid estimates
* Integrated Keyword Quality score!
* Keyword Opportunities tool
You can download the new version here
AdWords Editor allows you to quickly make changes to your PPC account, without having to login to the Adwords website.
New features in this release:
* First page bid estimates
* Integrated Keyword Quality score!
* Keyword Opportunities tool
You can download the new version here
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How to 301 Redirect for SEO purposes, maximizing link juice to every pageDawn Rossi, September 19, 2008 |
To maximize your website pages link juice, there are a few simple rules you have to follow:
#1. Avoid session variables in your urls
This is bad: http://www.mydomain.com/?PHPSESSID=1234567
#2. Avoid duplicate content
If you're using clean urls, category pages (WordPress, vBulletin, Joomla) or tags, you will end up with multiple copies of the same content with different urls:
http://www.mydomain.com/showthread.php?id=12345
http://www.mydomain.com/clean_thread_name-t12345.html
http://www.mydomain.com/?id=12345
http://www.mydomain.com/index.php
Where all four versions are pointing to the exact same page.
=
To fix this, you have to "301 redirect" to a single clean version of each page.
301 redirect is the act of telling search engines, your page permanently moved to a new address, keeping all link juice flowing to a single place.
Here's how:
At the top of every display script, fetch the current clean-url for that page and if that doesn't match REQUEST_URI, redirect the user to the clean version:
// For SEO purposes, 301 redirect if url
// is not what it needs to be
{
// Get clean url for this page
$clean_url = GetCleanThreadURL($forumid, $threadid);
$current_url_noparams = $REQUEST_URI;
if (($pos = strpos($current_url_noparams,"?"))!==false)
{
$current_url_noparams = substr($current_url_noparams,0,$pos);
}
// If we have a session ID, or current_no_params doesn't match clean url
if (strpos($REQUEST_URI, "PHPSESSID")!==false ||
Strcasecmp($current_url_noparams, $clean_rul)!=0)
{
// Redirect user to clean url
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: $clean_url");
return;
}
}
#1. Avoid session variables in your urls
This is bad: http://www.mydomain.com/?PHPSESSID=1234567
#2. Avoid duplicate content
If you're using clean urls, category pages (WordPress, vBulletin, Joomla) or tags, you will end up with multiple copies of the same content with different urls:
http://www.mydomain.com/showthread.php?id=12345
http://www.mydomain.com/clean_thread_name-t12345.html
http://www.mydomain.com/?id=12345
http://www.mydomain.com/index.php
Where all four versions are pointing to the exact same page.
=
To fix this, you have to "301 redirect" to a single clean version of each page.
301 redirect is the act of telling search engines, your page permanently moved to a new address, keeping all link juice flowing to a single place.
Here's how:
At the top of every display script, fetch the current clean-url for that page and if that doesn't match REQUEST_URI, redirect the user to the clean version:
// For SEO purposes, 301 redirect if url
// is not what it needs to be
{
// Get clean url for this page
$clean_url = GetCleanThreadURL($forumid, $threadid);
$current_url_noparams = $REQUEST_URI;
if (($pos = strpos($current_url_noparams,"?"))!==false)
{
$current_url_noparams = substr($current_url_noparams,0,$pos);
}
// If we have a session ID, or current_no_params doesn't match clean url
if (strpos($REQUEST_URI, "PHPSESSID")!==false ||
Strcasecmp($current_url_noparams, $clean_rul)!=0)
{
// Redirect user to clean url
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: $clean_url");
return;
}
}
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Affiliate Summit East 2008-Day 3Rhonda W, August 14, 2008 |
Day 3
The last day of the affiliate summit was a little more laid back, as the summit was coming to a close. We took the opportunity to get into the "cashinator" machine and grab some wind blown cash, take some pictures and generally just enjoy some casual networking.
Kyle, Software Projects Sr. Engineer, took some time to pose with yet another set of "booth babes". I think this may have been his favorite part of the summit.
By the end of the day most booth owners were trying to give way the left over promotional props, to avoid taking them back home. The Software Projects team scored some really cool gifts, which I took home and shared with my kids. I am now known as, "the coolest mom ever".
The gifts ranged from T-shirts, light-up pens, coffee cups, fake stacks of money and many other unique props.
A few of the unique giveaways offered at the Affiliate Summit.
Overall, the summit was a great networking event. We will cherish new friendships made and carry away some newfound Affiliate Marketing knowledge. I can't wait to attend the next Affiliate Summit. We at Software Projects are looking forward to speaking with the new contacts we made and helping them grow their business online.
The last day of the affiliate summit was a little more laid back, as the summit was coming to a close. We took the opportunity to get into the "cashinator" machine and grab some wind blown cash, take some pictures and generally just enjoy some casual networking.
Kyle, Software Projects Sr. Engineer, took some time to pose with yet another set of "booth babes". I think this may have been his favorite part of the summit.
By the end of the day most booth owners were trying to give way the left over promotional props, to avoid taking them back home. The Software Projects team scored some really cool gifts, which I took home and shared with my kids. I am now known as, "the coolest mom ever".
The gifts ranged from T-shirts, light-up pens, coffee cups, fake stacks of money and many other unique props.
A few of the unique giveaways offered at the Affiliate Summit.
Overall, the summit was a great networking event. We will cherish new friendships made and carry away some newfound Affiliate Marketing knowledge. I can't wait to attend the next Affiliate Summit. We at Software Projects are looking forward to speaking with the new contacts we made and helping them grow their business online.
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