OpenSRS has over 10,000 resellers in 100 countries who have sold over 10 million domain names and you’ll have full access to all their products and services including their market-beating pricing.

An example of how your domain name reseller Storefront could look

If you’re just getting started you can setup your own ‘Storefront’ – a fully hosted domain name sales and management website that will have you up and selling domain names in no time. You can sell every Global Top-level Domain (gTLD) and Country-Code Top-level domain (ccTLD) we offer as well as Premium Domains from the portfolios of our aftermarket domain partners. OpenSRS Storefront also allows you to offer domain and email forwarding, along with WHOIS Privacy. All at no additional cost to you!

All OpenSRS reseller accounts include full access to the OpenSRS API – a powerful set of integration tools that automate the provision of domain names, DNS, email services and SSL certificates.

It is a comprehensive library of information that enables both everyday people and governments to ensure that they have data and a means of contact for the millions of people who currently run websites that are live on the internet and, more specifically, those that are making money from online enterprises, much like you.

However, having all of your details in plain view to anyone with access to the internet does present very obvious risks to you. The first of these risks is obviously that having your full name, address and other contact information is a bit of an intrusion into your privacy. It means that anyone will be able to find you and that you could be subject to malicious communications of various kinds, as well as simply being consistently sent junk mail.

An example of this is spam programs that harvest email addresses directly from the WHOIS database in order to spread malware. As these addresses are provided in plain text, it is trivial for software to crawl the WHOIS database and obtain email addresses to send spam too. This is a great source of annoyance to those who often have to trawl through pages of spam to get to the emails they actually want.

Also, the fact that your home address is part of your WHOIS listing could open you up to, aside from junk mail, worse problems such as burglary. If someone can see that you are the owner of a website that makes a lot of money, then this makes you a prime target for burglaries and muggings. The fact that people who may see you as a target can access your location makes you very vulnerable.

Another issue that can arise from your personal details being so readily available is that you could be subject to consistent pestering from marketers. After harvesting your contact details from the WHOIS database, they can continuously send you both postal and email advertisements, perhaps even sending salesmen to visit you personally. All of these things contribute to diverting your attention away from your actual business and could cause you to lose a lot of money.

Every factor outlined above mean that being on the WHOIS database is very dangerous and can be detrimental to your business and your life in general. Many hosting packages, including those offered by simplewebhosting.co.uk, enable you to opt-out of being included on the WHOIS database in order to safeguard your privacy and your information.

As you can see, this is definitely a wise choice and will save you from a lot of unnecessary difficulties and wasted time. An opt-out means that you have more time to spend on what is important: ensuring that your business is successful and prosperous.

This is because it instantly identifies your company as a business that is based in the United Kingdom. For many people, buying from a company that is located in the same country as them gives a sense of peace of mind that they don’t get.

Having a .uk domain name means that a customer knows straight away that your company is based in the UK. Any customer resident in the United Kingdom will be instantly more attached to your organisation, knowing that it is based in the same country as they are.

Also, a .uk domain name looks immediately more professional than a domain name such as .biz or .me.uk. Automatically, the domain names .com and .co.uk look corporate and professional, meaning that customers are far more likely to buy from a company that has one of these two domain names.

Of course, if you are outside of the UK, then you should go for a .com, or the particular TLD for your country. The connotations of a corporate feel mean that the extra cost of a .uk domain name is definitely justifiable based on the money you will make from the corporate identity it provides.

Looking professional also means that you are trusted by customers, which is an excellent achievement for any company and means that you are almost guaranteed to earn money from these customers. They are far more likely to buy from an organisation that they feel they can trust.

As well as this, a .uk domain name has the advantage of being one of the first extensions people decide to guess at if they forget the extension of a website. If, for example, a customer remembers the “simplewebhosting” part of our domain name, but cannot remember the extension, then the .uk domain name is one of the first extensions that they will try, especially if they live in the United Kingdom.

So overall, there is a multitude of benefits to registering a .uk domain name for your business website. It helps to establish your company’s identity as a UK business and increases the likelihood of your website being visited and trusted, both of which are very useful factors when trying to establish a presence online.

Of course, this does not mean you are limited to just the .uk domain name. You could buy one, or even several more, other domain names and redirect them all back to one particular domain name, whichever one you want to use.

However, .uk is certainly a domain name that has its benefits and therefore you should consider it as the best possible choice of domain name for your UK-based company website.

Of course, there is one simple way to avoid a predicament like this. Buy more than one domain name.

There are many advantages to purchasing various domain names. Firstly, as in the example above, it can be solution to the woes of weighing up which of the domain names are the best for you. Buying all of them means that you don’t have to worry and can redirect them all to the one that you decide is your favourite in the end. It is a simple way to solve what can be a very difficult problem for many webmasters, particularly those setting up a website for the very first time.

In addition, buying all of the different TLDs is helpful for securing the brand identity of your company. For example, if you were to buy only the .com domain name, that opens the field up for another organisation to purchase the .co.uk domain name. This means that they could be confused by surfers with your company, meaning that another business (who could even be your direct competition) could be benefiting from the traffic that is intended for your site.

Furthermore, buying up all of the domain names allows you to redirect all of the traffic to those other TLDs to the main domain name that your business uses. This makes your website easier for users to find as they may be unsure which TLD it is, something which ceases to be an issue if a large number of popular domain names are bought by the webmaster.

Often, a user will use the .com or .co.uk extension automatically when typing in a web address, so having both of these domain names in your permission is almost essential if you want to preserve the traffic for yourself. Not having these two domain names could mean that you lose traffic to the person who actually does own that domain name, meaning that they get the visitors that you originally had earned. The potential levitra order costs to your organisation are huge if business is continuously lost in this way.

So to conclude, it is advisable to buy as many domain names as possible for your website, ideally incorporating all of the popular TLDs, so as to ensure that all traffic is redirected to your domain name instead of that of a business with a similar name or, even worse, a competitor.

Mistakes cannot afford to be made when it comes to domain names, so when it comes to this issue, it’s a case of the more the merrier!

The domain name is also a first impression for the customer and can have a huge impact in how your company is perceived. For example, a website selling web hosting that has the domain name “simplewebhosting.co.uk” is instantly more professional and trustworthy than “host-ur-site-ere-lol-for-cheap.co.uk”. It’s imperative that you are careful with your naming. There are some simple rules that you can follow.

Firstly, we would always suggest that you keep the domain name short and simple. No-one is going to remember a lengthy and complex domain name (see above example) and thus you will lose out on the massive potential market of word of mouth advertising (read more on that here). Also, it means that people are going to have to search for your website every time, which is a problem if you don’t rank particularly highly in search engine results.

Also, it is important to ensure that your domain name isn’t similar to someone else’s. Your domain needs to stand out as being unique; otherwise you will just be seen as copying someone else. Managing a unique identity for your website is essential as it provides something for you to be identified by, both online and in general as an organisation. Without a unique identity, you have no hope of your domain name becoming recognisable and thus the chance of people becoming regular visitors to your website is lowered.

Equally important is that your domain name is low on usage of numbers and symbols. If you choose a domain name that is full of awkward characters and numbers, then there is a higher chance of people forgetting it, or getting the wrong combination of these symbols and numerical figures. It is much easier to remember a domain name that is comprised of normal English words than one that is full of symbols or numbers (again see the example at the beginning of this article).

Along with avoiding numbers and symbols, you must make your domain name easy to type. There is no point in using words that are difficult to spell or words with lots of awkward letters (like Q and X) in because people will start making mistakes and not getting to your website, or worse being sent to someone else’s website. Again, this could result in them referring back to search engines, which (depending on the quality of your SEO) could be disastrous.

So, there are a number of factors that you need to take into account when you are selecting the domain name for your business’ website. Various issues can arise that you must work around in order to come up with a domain name that manages to be descriptive whilst also being short and memorable.

It is a difficult process to get right, but a strong domain name can lead to a very successful website indeed.

As a result of this action by CNNIC, we have no choice but to suspend new .cn registrations

Please note that renewals and transfers will continue to be supported.

CNNIC says the suspension will allow them to implement a better methodology to verify registrant information from overseas registrations. You will remember that in mid-December, CNNIC put into place new requirements for supporting documentation required to be submitted with new registrations.

There is no timetable for the resumption of new registrations. We’ll keep you posted as new information becomes available.

Under the new policy, individuals are effectively barred from registering .cn domain names as CNNIC now requires a paper application which includes a business seal, company business license (photocopy), and registrant ID (photocopy).

More information:

• China Global Times article
• CircleID post

At this time, we are working with Neustar, our registration provider for .cn domains, to determine the exact details of the new policy. It is not yet known what impact this new policy will have on .cn registrations.

For the time being, we continue to process registrations as usual.

We will update our blog with further information as we receive it.

Customers who don’t choose our domain privacy option have their personal data made available to everyone simply by doing a ‘WHOIS’ lookup. This information provides the (legally required) ownership of the domain name including name, address, telephone number and e-mail address. You can view a sample WHOIS lookup for simplewebhosting.co.uk here and another for simpledomainnames.com here.

‘Enterprising’ companies with official-sounding names such as the Domain Registry of America or Domain Renewal Group then write to you suggesting that you should pay them to renew your domain name with them. You MUST NOT do so!

1) The example shown from Domain Renewal Group charges £20 for a .com domain – if you renew with simplewebhosting.co.uk or simpledomainnames.co.uk, we charge you just £9.99!

2) By renewing your domain name with one of these companies, you are transferring your domain name away from our control and to a company in the USA. These companies seldomly have telephone support and are typically difficult to get hold of.

So if you get an official-looking letter from one of these companies, you are quite safe to shred it. If you’re not 100% sure and want to run it past us, get in touch.

The .info generic top-level domain was introduced in 2001 and has since grown to be one of the most widely used TLDs on the Internet. .info domains, as the extension would suggest, tend to be used mainly for websites where the primary goal is to provide information. You’ll find everything from travel information sites to government sites.

Find out more and get your .info today with simpledomainnames.co.uk