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More and more often, you hear stories about information loss: identities stolen, emails lost or destroyed illegally, credit card information compromised, etc.  Depending on the degree of sensitivity, these situations can create a major headache (and in some instances, lawsuits) for individuals, companies and management alike.

In addition to selecting the right hosting and monitoring services for your data, it’s important to ask yourself regularly if you and your business are taking the right precautions to protect sensitive information.

At a bare minimum, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Do we have an enterprise strategy for protecting sensitive information?
2. How well is the strategy being executed?
3. Who is responsible for its execution and enforcement?
4. Does this strategy control access to sensitive information within and outside of the company?
5. Do we know where our sensitive information is at any point in time?

Asking and addressing these key questions can help us better control our sensitive content and prevent the unauthorized access and potential theft or loss of it, resulting in less overall risk to ourselves and our businesses.

We see a ton of new domain names each day– some good, some great, some…well, you know.  Regardless if it’s a blog,  personal website, or a full-scale enterprise presence, choosing the right domain name is crucial in creating a successful website project.

Registering your domain name may be a piece of cake, but deciding on a name isn’t always so easy.

Below are a few simple tips for choosing the right domain name:

1) Make it Relevant – When at all possible, choose a domain name that closely matches your project purpose.  If you’re a business, use your business name when possible.  For personal sites and blogs, focus on your core theme or brand goals when choosing a name.  Remember- your domain name should always relate to and be cohesive with your overall business and brand strategy.

2) Consider your Searchability – Choose a name that is rich in key words that describe or relate to your project/business.  This will help indirectly increase your site visitors as Google will see links that use your domain name.  The benefits are two-fold– you’ll have a domain name that not only reaches your audience but also lands you a little higher in search results.

3) Keep it Simple – Choose a name that people can easily remember.  Avoid unnecessary numbers and lengthy words. If people have to write it down, chances are that it’s too long and they’ll easily forget it.  Heed the basic marketing principle “keep it simple, stupid” and avoid any unnecessary complexities.

With these guidelines as a start, you’ll be well on your way to choosing the right domain name for your business or project needs.   And to our more seasoned site managers, do you have any additional tips to share?

During our almost 11 year history we’ve maintained a 100% DNS uptime. Deploying many DNS servers in multiple locations has been key in providing such up time. An extension of this has been utilizing Anycast to provide higher availability, help reduce DNS latency and increase resilience to internet based attacks.

Visit the Wikipedia page about anycast if you’re interested in detailed information or are looking for alternative sleep aids.

DNS queries are routed to the data center closest to you or your customers, lowering DNS response times. This results in a faster loading site and better end user experience.

Fact: For every 1000 kilometers of fiber there are 10 milliseconds of delay

We are also able to perform maintenance without effecting service. DNS traffic is automatically rerouted to the next closest data center during a maintenance window.

Anycast also helps in minimizing the effectiveness of DNS directed DDOS attacks, since a single NS record is distributed across multiple locations, servers and bandwidth providers.

Since 2007, No-IP has been using IP anycast on some of our name server (NS) records. In the coming months all Managed and Backup DNS NS records will use anycast. Stay tuned as we keep you posted with our progress including other exiting features to be announced later this year.

The second beta release of the Windows 3.0.1 b Dynamic Update Client (DUC) is now available. We’ve fixed a few issues with the first beta.

Bug Fixes/ Features Include:

• Windows Service in XP
• NAT WAN IP discovery issues
• Mouseover tray icon for current IP
• few minor fixes

This new version can be downloaded on our Windows Beta download page.

Disclaimer: Should you encounter any bugs, glitches, lack of functionality or
other problems with the client, please let us know immediately so we
can rectify these accordingly. Your help in this regard is greatly
appreciated.

The new Windows DUC (Dynamic Update Client) is almost ready. We’d like to invite anyone interested in trying out the beta to download it and give it a whirl. Please let us know what you think about it and if there is anything you can think of or if you run into any bugs please let us know. You can email beta@no-ip.com if you would like to comment.

Some of the new features of the Windows DUC include:

• Modern Interface, bye bye to the smileys 🙂
• Client Tracking – A new feature coming to the site (although the web interface is not available just yet) giving some control to the client from our website, great for users managing multiple update clients.
• Secure key based authentication, no passwords will be stored on the end user computer
• Notifications of expiring services
• DNS based IP check, less overhead when polling for your current WAN IP address

Download version 3.0.0b today!

Take it for a spin and let us know what you think!

We have released version 3.1.3b2 of our Mac update client. The previous version had included the incorrect binary for the daemon mode. This would have effected Intel based systems prior to Snow Leopard vs 10.6.

Please download the new version if you are using this beta.

This has been tested and confirmed working back to Tiger 10.4.5.

Again, we welcome any comments regarding the MAC update client.

Yes, it’s been a while since we’ve touched on the No-IP Mac OSX client. You can grab a copy of the beta over at http://www.no-ip.com/downloads.php?page=mac .

This version mainly focuses on bug fixes regarding newer versions of OS X such as Snow Leapord.

Changes to the Mac OSX Client:

• Improved Daemon Functionality
• Standardized Drag and Drop Installer
• Utilizes New Logos
• And More

Let us know if you run into any issues. We will also be re-writing the Mac Client from the ground up in the near future. If you have any feature requests let us know as we are in the planning stages for the next version 3.2.

Want to use a third party update client that restricts the length of your current No-IP account email address? Perhaps you just want a shorter username to login to the website with? Yes it’s about time, we’ve gone Web 1.0 and introduced No-IP account usernames in addition to email address based logins.

Many users have requested this feature. Some hardware vendors that have embedded our dynamic dns services into their product have hard coded a fixed length of characters for the username field. Some third party vendors that have been brought to our attention seem to cut them off at about 16. Many email addresses are longer than this, so we just want to give our users the option.

Create your username today! You’ll also be prompted when to create one when you first login if you don’t have one assigned to your account.

No-IP now supports the creation and setup of IPv6 (AAAA) records via the web interface. This is a feature available to our Plus Managed DNS users that have already received IPv6 records from their ISP or bandwidth provider. Please note that IPv6 is not yet supported by our software update clients.

IPv6 is the internet protocol version 6 that is set to replace the current version 4 sometime in the next upcoming years. IPv6 was introduced in 1998 and as of 2008 is being used by about 1% of the internet addressable devices in the world.

For more information on IPv6 records please take a look at this article.