easyDNS Blog

We will be cutting over to the new front end website on Monday, at 11:00am EST.

Interested parties can have a look at it now:

http://web.easydns.com

although there are still a few wrinkles to iron out.

As most of you know, the new member user interface has been live for awhile and is accessible now. Please review How to Port a Domain to the new easyDNS User Interface ahead of moving any domains over.

We are theologically opposed to "flash cuts". Meaning there will probably never be a day when we just "move everybody over" to the new system. Those events are company killers. We're an incremental cutover kind of shop, and that's what we'll be doing here.

Moving forward, there will increasing incentives to use the new system, and diminishing returns to staying on the old one. At some point we will handle certain support requests by asking you to move your domain to the new system where whatever bug it is you've found on the old system has been fixed or whatever it is that you are asking us to do can be done in the UI (example: exempting a domain from greylisting).

As we roll out new features (something we will finally start doing again), they'll all roll out to the new system, not the old (because if you so much as tweak anything on the old system, it explodes).

We'll be making a series of announcements here as we lead up to, and then in the aftermath of, the Cutover.

Here's a few we can take care of right here:

• The blog will be moving to a new CMS, which is more in keeping with the look of the new front end. We'll try to do this in a way where the RSS feeds you may have in your feedreaders and aggregators will still work.
  
  
• Secondary DNS is no longer a product, it's a capability. This means we will no longer be offering secondary DNS on it's own. Sign up for DNS Hosting or DNS Pro and run it in secondary DNS mode. All existing secondary DNS users and subscriptions blocks are grandfathered in forever. No forced upgrades (unless your domain goes over usage in queries).
  
  
• The price of registration only, or transfer only on most TLDs has been dropped to $19. We will be adding some nice features to the parked domains soon, but we're still going to drop the price. (If there's a domain you want to register ahead of monday you can log into the new platform now using your existing userid/password and add the domain there directly and get the reduced price now).
  

We'll break out other announcements into seperate posts. Feel free to comment here.

We are now accepting orders for .CO Domain International Sunrise claims. (We previously mentioned the rollout of the .CO Top Level Domain here)

This is for holders of registered trademarks, where the registration date is prior to July 31, 2008.

The price for Sunrise claims is $300 USD, which covers the first year registration for successful claims.
If your claim is not successful, we will refund $50 back to you.
(Our cost on this breaks out to $205 non-refundable for the sunrise claim, and $25 for the first year registration).

The International Sunrise phase of the .CO rollout continues through until June 10, 2010. The order of applications does not matter. If there are more than one valid trademark orders for the same domain, that domain will go into an auction process.

As our customers may be aware, we are breaking with our usual policy of ignoring new top-level-domains (as we wrote here and here) and recommending you pursue a .CO domain under the following circumstances:

If you are running a production, webfront, ecommerce, online business that is identfied primarily by your .com web address, then you should attempt to grab the .CO version of your domain. While normally we feel it is safe to ignore most top-level-domains, and that you can safely not defend your names within them, we feel that .CO is an exception because of it's obvious typo and visual correlation to ".COM".

The .CO Registry has released this Open Letter to Brand Owners which describes their internal processes and structure but doesn't really change the fact that if you're currently branded under .COM and you take your presence seriously, you're probably going to bite the bullet.

How to Enter Your Sunrise Claim