We are happy to announce that we recently added the Google Translate Widget to the footer of our website! You will now be able to conveniently browse the No-IP website in 64 languages. We will also be adding additional languages to our Support Section soon. We hope this new feature makes our website a little easier to navigate. To choose your language, simply scroll to the footer of our website and click the Google Translate dropdown in the lower left corner, choose your language and voila!

Do you enjoy this new feature? How did you translate our website before? 

Scammers. What would we do without them? We have talked about the Domain Registry of America Scam before, but we recently got a letter in the mail from one of them and wanted to share it with you so you don’t get scammed too. As you can see, they are trying to claim that if the domain is not renewed through them, it will be lost. They are also charging $35 a year, $20+ more than the industry average for a year of a .com domain name. What the letter doesn’t say is that it is a total scam. (Click here to view a larger image of the letter)

How did they get my contact information?
When you register a domain, you need to provide the registrar with a valid name, mailing address and email address to provide to the WHOIS database, without this information you cannot register the domain. Shady domain registries troll the WHOIS records for domains that are soon to be expired and send a letter or email to the owner of the domain. It usually says something along the lines of “your domain is expiring soon, you must renew it before you lose it” What they don’t mention is that your domain is not currently registered with them and the transaction would actually be a domain transfer, not a renewal and at a price that is most likely 3 times as much!

You can avoid this entire scenario by purchasing or adding Private Registration to your domain name. Private Registration removes your contact information and inserts ours. We filter out all of the bad emails and snail mail and only forward the important stuff.

Receive free Private Registration when you add it to a domain or register a new domain! Expires 10.31.12. Coupon Code:  PRIVATE

*not valid on renewals or with any other offers, management reserves all rights.

Have you or a friend ever received one of these letters or email scams?

Did you know that last year alone there were 247,713 patent applications in the United States? The first Patent Act of the U.S. Congress was passed on April 10, 1790, titled “An Act to promote the progress of useful Arts”. But at what point do Patents stop promoting “useful arts”? The recent Samsung vs. Apple Patent lawsuits has brought forward some funny and ridiculous patents. Things like “rounded corners” on smartphone devices and finger gestures to switch between screens. Silly patents aren’t the only thing that is inhibiting discovery and innovation, patent trolls are too.

According to Wikipedia, a Patent Troll is someone that:

-Purchases a patent, often from a bankrupt firm, and then sues another company by claiming that one of its products infringes on the purchased patent;

-Enforces patents against purported infringers without itself intending to manufacture the patented product or supply the patented service;

-Enforces patents but has no manufacturing or research base;

-Focuses its efforts solely on enforcing patent rights; or

-Asserts patent infringement claims against non-copiers or against a large industry that is composed of non-copiers.

Gigaom recently released an article about Patent Trolls. It disclosed that Twitter because it is a large and profitable company, is often the target of patent trolls. These frivolous lawsuits typically take months, sometimes years to fight and hundreds of thousands of dollars. The troll isn’t even held responsible for these costs if the lawsuit is found to have been filed without merit.

A recent study at Boston University estimated that in 2011 alone, these baseless patent troll lawsuits cost U.S. technology companies more than 29 billion dollars.

Twitter and other companies that fall victim to these trolls are often forced to employ large teams of lawyers and employees focused solely on researching and fighting the lawsuits. If a patent troll were to attack a small company or startup, this could easily close their doors forever, further inhibiting innovation and discovery, all of which our country (and the world) were built on.

There is something that needs to be done to stop these baseless lawsuits from scaring individuals and companies into doing amazing new things. A new bill was announced in Congress last month by Representative Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon), the Saving High-tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes (SHIELD) Act [PDF], would force these patent trolls to pay for all fees related to the frivolous lawsuits if it is found to have no merit, thereby hopefully curbing some of these lawsuits from ever being filed.

What are your thoughts or comments on patent trolls? Please share your comments below.

Also, be sure to share this if you enjoyed it and do not feed the trolls.

That’s right, it is our birthday today, lucky number 13! We want to celebrate with all of our users who have helped us get here by offering a giveaway! Just answer the following question for a chance to win. The first 20 users to answer will win a No-IP t-shirt!

Tell us how long you have been using No-IP and what you use us for.

The winners are as follows:

Claudio Antonelli
Karl Håkansson
Ivan Tomovic
Robert Hedell
MANSOOR
Jimmy Utterström
xzero8192
David T Connolly
FRANCISCO EDUARDO ASCENCIO DOMINGUEZ
Charles Farence
Sotirios
Jason
Ezzine Karim
Andrey Z
Erik Vonderscheer
Grant W
jack
Pedro Chavez Gomez
Sebastian M
mahmoud
Cleber Medina
Paolo

Congrats! If you are one of the winners, please email ngoguen-giveaway[at]no-ip[dot]com with your T-Shirt size and mailing address.

A large majority of websites today experienced downtime because their provider experienced major technical difficulties. Many people complained on Twitter because that same provider hosts all of their web services, not just their website’s hosting or DNS.  One tip to live by is to diversify your services. If one provider is handling your email, DNS, and web hosting, you have a single point of failure. If that provider goes down, so does your online business activity for the day.

Websites are crucial to most businesses. I ordered a pizza earlier and because one pizza places website was down, I couldn’t view their menu online. You know what I did? I found another pizza place. This is just a drop in the bucket, but it can greatly affect small/large businesses that depend heavily on their online e-commerce.

How can you diversify your managed DNS?

Already have a DNS provider? You can have No-IP’s infrastructure act as a backup to your primary DNS in the event that it goes offline.  No-IP Squared works by having your current DNS provider list our DNS name servers on the domain.  Your zone then needs to be configured to back up to us too.  Once you specify your providers master DNS server IP in our manager, we will begin backing up and serving queries for your domain, if there is ever an outage. So, if your primary managed DNS provider goes down, your DNS records will automatically failover to ours, and your website won’t experience any downtime.

You can also do the opposite; No-IP as your primary managed DNS provider, and another provider set as the failover.

Remember, there are no upsides to downtime. Make sure your website is running on a rock solid foundation by not only choosing a fully redundant DNS provider but also by ensuring that your DNS is diversified.

Interested in a solution? Our Technical Support team is here to help! Give us a call today for more information.

Have you or your business ever been affected by a DNS outage? Share your thoughts below!

The winners for our No-IP 11,000 Facebook Likes giveaway are the following:

Barry Allen
Jose Mora
Clayton Holloway
Nick Eklund
Brad

Congrats! Please email ngoguen-giveaway(at)no-ip(dot)com to claim your prize…

Today I was in the post office mailing out some No-IP t-shirts from our past giveaway, when a college age girl came running in frantically. She rushed to the next available clerk and started explaining her issue. She had sent a package to Nigeria yesterday, and she had just found out it was a complete scam. The postal clerk said there was nothing that could be done.

The girls face dropped as she quietly thanked the clerk and walked slowly out of the post office surely ready to burst into tears at any moment…

I was filling out a customs form in the corner when this scenario was playing out and I couldn’t help but chuckle when I heard the girls plea. I thought in my head, “do people really still get scammed by craiglist scammers?”

Apparently, Yes.

What can you do to safeguard yourself against scammers?

1. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Typically, these scams start by the scammer replying to an item for sale or a job posting on Craigslist or another online posting site. The scammers often say that they are overseas or want the item fast and will send payment immediately. This is scam. The payment would have been a fake check for more than the price of the item. Upon deposit into your account, the scammer will request for you to send the extra money back to them via Western Union. After a few days, your bank will call you to let you know that the check was fake and the funds/fees are now your problem.

2. Be mindful of the sender of the email. If the address seems funny, or if the email is sent to more than just you, it is probably a scam.

3. Scammers often use stories that will pull at your heartstrings. “I lost my wife and three children and am now in Nigeria on missionary work feeding the poor, so please send the money here.” NO!

4. If a Nigerian Prince emails you and says he needs your help depositing money, please stop reading. You will not be handsomely rewarded, you will be scammed and feel really dumb. The same goes for someone that says they need your assistance claiming an unclaimed lottery ticket.

Microsoft recently did a study “Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are from Nigeria?” It is very interesting. Obviously, I am not the target audience of these emails and the scammers probably know that. 9 out of 10 people probably aren’t the audience, but that one person, (probably a grandparent, parent, or really gullible college student that refuses to listen to their much wiser parents) is their audience and it seems like they are still winning the battle.

Please don’t end up poor, scammed and feeling really dumb. Let me reiterate, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Do you know anyone that has been a victim of an online scam? Leave your thoughts and comments below!

Did you know that No-IP was an idea that was started in college by our founders? That small idea has grown into a great big idea with over 13.5 million users worldwide. We are proud to say that since 1999, we have been providing rock solid Dynamic DNS and Managed DNS , no ifs, ands, or buts.

Answer the following question for a chance to win a No-IP T-shirt or a Year of Enhanced DNS. 5 people will win. Winners will be announced on Tuesday, August 21, 2012. Leave your answer in the comments and be sure to Like this post and share it with your friends on Facebook and Twitter!

What No-IP service allows you to use your own domain name on our redundant and reliable managed DNS network?

We have all heard the horror stories. Websites go down all the time, it’s not a question of if, it’s when. A 2009 Dunn & Bradstreet survey reported that 49 percent of Fortune 500 companies experience at least 1.6 hours of unplanned downtime per week. That is over 80 hours of downtime a year, not including website maintenance downtime. How would these outages affect your business and brand reputation? Do you know how much it will cost you when your website goes down?

What would cause an outage of your website though? Downtime can be caused by internal and external issues. Natural events as simple as a lightning storm, or as extreme as hurricanes and earthquakes can easily take your website down, as well as man-made events like changes to network configurations, hardware or even wiring issues. Outages can cause both short term and long term problems that not only affect lost revenue, labour costs and marketing costs, but also indirect things like lost customers, lost business opportunities, driving traffic to your competitors and irreversible brand damage.

We have all heard about the recent Amazon outage that affected major brands like Instagram, Netflix, Pinterest, and others. Not only was this an Amazon issue, but because of the other companies that were directly involved, it became those companies issue as well. Many customers could be found on Twitter complaining about the outages of Netflix to them directly, even though the issue wasn’t even caused by Netflix. If your customers aren’t happy, your brand isn’t happy.

So, how much does all of this downtime cost a company? It is all dependent on how much revenue and sales your company generates from your website. If you are generating $10,000 a day from your website and your website is down for a few hours, this could greatly affect your bottom line. It could be the same scenerio if you generate sales leads via your website. If customers search for your website and it is down, the first thing they are going to do is go to a search engine and find another provider.

Downtime can potentially cost your business tens of thousands of dollars a year. Why take the risk? If your website is important to you, you should really think about a Managed DNS solution. DNS is an essential part of the Internet.  If your website is hosted on web servers that are only located in one or two locations, and something happens, your entire website can be taken down. DNS that is hosted in many geographically diverse locations means that even if the unthinkable happens, your customers will still be able to reach your site.

The location of DNS servers is important in ensuring 100% uptime. No-IP deploys nameservers across the globe at geographically unique datacenters using different tier 1 bandwidth providers to ensure a natural disaster or connectivity outage does not disrupt our robust DNS network.

Remember, there are no upsides to downtime.

Have you or your business ever been affected by a DNS outage? Share your thoughts below!