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!

Q: How many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: None. It’s a hardware problem.

We are now a very connected population. According to a Pew study, “45% of cell phone owners said that their phone is a smartphone.” Nearly half of the cell phone users in this country are on smartphones, which means they are also accessing the Internet from their phones.

Most smartphone users access the Internet through a 3g or 4g connection from their service provider. Data can be costly though and these networks can also be slow if located in a densely populated area.  So, when there is a free WiFi network available, people typically use it. Did you know that when you are on an unsecured wireless network you can easily be hacked? Follow these tips to keep your information safe and secure while browsing on public WiFi.

1. Download a VPN app on your device. When you are on the Internet, go through the VPN. This will encrypt and secure all of your browsings. What exactly is a Virtual Private Network (VPN)?

2. Never access sensitive information over an open network without a VPN in place. Do not enter passwords and other sensitive information.

3. Turn on encryption if your phone has the option. How to turn on encryption: iPhone, Samsung Galaxy A quick search on Google for “How to encrypt data on a (your smart phone)” should return directions if your phone supports encryption.

Any other tips for safe Internet browsing via your smartphone? Leave them in the comments. Do you use a VPN app on your phone? Which one do you use?

Recently, we had a user complain on our Facebook page about not being able to share his free No-IP Hostname with his friends on Facebook. His hostname was something like gameserver.no-ip.org. Facebook thought he was posting spam.  This is one of the downsides of our No-IP Free and Enhanced service. So, why does this happen?

No-IP Free Dynamic DNS and Enhanced DNS users share roughly 50 different domains. With these services, you are relying on millions of other people doing the right thing with their hosts, which unfortunately isn’t always the case. Our service sometimes fall prey to cyberscammers and spammers. They create a hostname, and then send out spam on it. Our abuse team is amazing and they are usually pretty quick to shut them down. But because we have a history of this type of abuse on our domains, Facebook and other websites don’t like when people share our links.

So, because of a few bad  people it punishes everyone? Yup. Isn’t that life though?
There is nothing that we can really do about it either, aside from shutting down our Free and Enhanced service or simply deterring these scammers by moving to a paid model. Don’t worry though, we aren’t going to do that. Just be aware that when you are using our shared domain services, you may have trouble sharing and posting content…

Our shared domains are a great choice for someone that wants to run a small video game server, reach their computer remotely, or view a webcam over the internet, but if you are going to be using your domain for something a little more important than that like say, run a blog, website, etc, you may want to think about registering your own domain name and using the hostnames on it.   With No-IP Plus DNS, you register your very own domain (www.yourname.com or www.yourbusiness.com) and we handle the DNS for you!

If you believe the actions of one of our users violates our Terms of Service, help us out by emailing Abuse@no-ip.com.

Now that we have fully restored functionality to our POP3/IMAP email service, we would like to take a few moments to share what exactly caused this outage, our efforts to restore email and the steps we are taking to ensure that this doesn’t happen again. We know that many of our customers were impacted by this outage and we sincerely apologize.

As many of you are already well aware, yesterday we suffered a service disruption on our POP3/IMAP email. This event rides on the coat tails of the service disruption that we had last fall. So, how did this happen again?

Well… The outage occurred because a Raid Controller bit the dust, crippling the entire POP3/IMAP storage system. Our other email services Reflector, SMTP, and Backup MX were not affected.

“I thought you guys weren’t managing email in house anymore? Why haven’t you transferred me to the new service provider?”
The process to transfer accounts over to the new service provider has proven to be a very arduous task. We are now working around the clock to get everyone transferred over. Although users have still been on the old configuration since the outage in the fall, we moved the system to an older, more tested configuration that had proven to be reliable in other situations.

“What was the resolution process like?”
Resolution to the outage was a team effort. Alerts started going off at 4am that the network was down and our engineers were on it immediately. Our senior network engineer was on the first flight out of Reno to the data center to replace the faulty hardware. Our support staff did their best to give whatever information was available to customers that called in and submitted tickets. The problem was that there wasn’t a definitive time frame for the resolution process, because it was all riding on how quickly the installation and data migration to the new Raid Controller would go.

While we waited on the hardware installation, our engineers created a temporary webmail fix. All email functionality was available via the fix.  (Including the emails that had been received since the network disruption occurred.)

Slowly but surely, the Raid Controller rebooted and loaded. Around 7pm last night, email was back up and running with all delayed email delivered.

For our customers that were affected by this outage, we will provided a 5 day pro-rated credit of our email service. Customers will not have to do anything in order to receive this credit, as it will automatically be applied to their account.

Last, but certainly not least, we want to apologize. We know how important email is and we understand our customers frustration with the system. We have amped up our efforts to complete the migration to the new service provider for the remaining customers we support. We are doing everything we can to learn from this situation to drive improvements to not only our mail service, but all of our services.