internet business

Wow!

This is completely amazing.  This is a tool that every serious eBay seller should be using.

Imagine being able to type in a few keywords for an item you want to sell on eBay, and have results come back that tell you:-

I’m not kidding here folks, this is going to make eBay a VERY different place to sell on.

Go and take a look now at this little baby, there’s a movie, plus you can choose from either the web based version or a desktop version.  Just click the image below.

Spam has been on the increase the last week or so, so it’s bound to stop completely in the next month as the spammers get closed down.

Yes, I’ve noticed this cyclic trend which last about 4 months.  Increasing amounts of spam and then nothing as someone out there looking after our interests closes the spammers down yet again.

The spammers shrug and move on.  It’s part of their job.

Now there’s one type of spam mail that always makes me smile, and that’s the kind with the unusual sender names.  It could just be one person doing it, but I guess it’s a program that several spammers have.

You must have received them "Dangling J Hoosegow", "Atrocious P Fieldmouse" and so on?

Well today I received a PayPal spoof mail from someone who’s sent me $93.50 with a clickable "View the details of this transaction online".  I get one of those every couple of days.

But what made this one unusual and also made me laugh was that instead of it being sent from PayPal or even the name of the peson mentioned in the email, it was from "Check K. Pederasty". 

Obviously, whoever had sent it has no idea what a pederast is or they wouldn’t have used that particular word as a last name…

Recently I received an email from UK2.net who I have a few domains hosted with.  I don’t host websites with them, I’ve just used them as domain registrars.

The email had some bulleted information:-

Now on the face of it, it seems that some of their customers have lost domains because they didn’t renew.  Probably because they hadn’t set their spam filters correctly, or relied on them to magically work, and then the reminder emails didn’t get through.  Or maybe they just forgot to renew.

And it would seem (on the face of it) that UK2 are trying to remedy that, by automatically renewing domains instead of letting them expire.

There is another angle to this of course.

I stopped using UK2.net as a domain registrar because they don’t give what I consider a proper service to their customers.

I’ll tell you exactly why I think that.

I decided over 12 months ago that it was time to upgrade to a dedicated server to host my domains on.  The hosting company I went to said that I needed to go to my domain registrar and register nameservers against the domain I wanted to assign to the server.

Fair enough, I checked it out and it yes I did need to register nameservers.

So I went to the UK2.net control panel for one of my domains that I decided to use as the home for my dedicated server, and tried to register a nameserver.  No luck there.

So I contacted their support, and they said I needed to buy their "Professional DNS Management" package at £35.00 / year.

Hmmm.  I wasn’t happy about that, something didn’t seem quite right.  But I paid up and waited for it to be activated.

When I received the email to get access to the "Professional DNS management" (their words remember), I eagerly logged onto the domain, and registered the nameservers.

That was when my trouble started.

After 7 days of seeing my nameservers flicker from one IP address to another, I decided it didn’t work.  During this time I contacted UK2.net support many times and received replies from people that clearly knew less about it than I did by this time.

I was also in touch with my server host during this time, and they were very helpful.  They suggested I go to 123-reg.co.uk who are part of Pipex as they don’t charge extra, and the registering nameservers definitely worked as they’d used them too.

Well, I already had a lot of respect for Pipex, techy friends had told me how good they were.

So I went to 123-reg, and took out a new domain with them.  I then went into the control panel, and registered the nameservers and the IP addresses.

24 hours later, everything was working perfectly, and I’d learned a lesson.

I then decded to transfer my other domains registration and hosting to 123-reg.

Woah!  Guess what?  UK2.net charge you to do that. £12.99 per domain.  What’s more you have to FAX their billing department.

Well, who uses FAX now when we all have scanners and email?

So in order to transfer MY domain to another host, I have to pay for it, and buy a fax machine or service in order to do it.  And even then, in their small print, if I don’t follow their process EXACTLY, then the transfer may not take place, but I still get charged for it.

What’s more, to get at the information I just described above is extremely difficult to say the least.  And when I did get to the page on their site, the links weren’t obvious at all, they just blended in with the rest of the text on the page so that it wasn’t easy to see that there even were any links.

No blue underlines at all. 

Sorry guys, but that sounds like severely dodgy practice to me.  It seems like deliberate barriers are being put in my way to stop me from moving.  Ring a bell with AOL at all?

So, okay, I decided I just wouldn’t register any new domains with them.  And over time as I decide to let some of the domains die quietly as they were for projects that never saw the light of day, eventually I’ll be left with 3 or 4 domains and then I’ll bite the bullet and move them to 123-reg.

That seemed like a reasonable plan until I received the communication at the top of this page.

Now, my domains won’t ever be allowed to expire unless I keep on top of them, and set them so that they won’t "auto renew".

I’ll tell you why I think this is dodgy practice and extremely unethical, and you can be the judge for yourself.

I logged onto the control panel to set all my domains to auto expire.  Guess what?  If the domain has more than 3 months to go, you can’t set it to auto expire.  Gosh, that’s conveniently been programmed in for UK2.net’s benefit.

Er, why?  Well I think it’s so that there’s a chance that I might forget to do it, and end up paying a domain registration fee for a domain I no longer want.

And if the email reminder from UK2.net happens to not reach me because of a "spam filter" (I don’t use spam filters at all, but that’s another story), then that’s not UK2.net’s fault is it?

How bloody satisfying it must be for them, laughing as they take domain registrations fees from "over 1 million domains", many ( I think I read somewhere an estimated 90%) of which are never used.  Normally these domains would gracefully expire, now they’ll be kept going by this practice of UK2.net.

So I contacted their support people again.  Here’s a transcript of yet again another very unsatisfying conversation with them.

So now I have to check each domain hosted by UK2.net that I want to expire and put them in my diary so that 3 months before I can set them to auto expire.

As I pointed out to Mat (sic), the real trouble will start when people start doing chargebacks.  I certainly wouldn’t like to be in charge of the UK2.net merchant account when their bank freezes it for investigation.

We’ll see what happens…

As I have a number of domains hosted on my own dedicated cPanel based server with Hostgator, I make sure I back them up every week or so.

But sometimes I forget. And sometimes I’ll forget for three weeks running, which means my last backups were taken a month ago. I think I’ve just been asking for trouble, and I’ve been lucky so far.

Actually, I did lose a sub-domain recently when I moved servers…

I forgot that I’d created the sub-domain using WHM as a completely separate account cPanel in it’s own right. It wasn’t part of the main domain account.

Maybe you didn’t know you could do that, I stumbled across it by accident, and it can be useful in certain circumstances.

So, I moved servers.

I leased the new server, then used WHM root access to copy all the accounts over to the new server. No I didn’t know you could do that either until I meeded to do it, and had a poke round in the WHM screens.

With a bit of trial and error, I managed to work out how it was done. I’m not a system administrator or a Linux geek / guru, so it was a bit of an achievement for me, and I was quite pleased with myself.

Well, I’d just set myself up for a fall hadn’t I?

While I was sitting there all pleased with myself, I forgot to copy a useful little test subdomain I’d set up as a separate account, thinking it would copy across with the main domain. Of course, now I know better.

It was a separate account wasn’t it?

Oh well.

I lost it all completely when I closed the old server down.

So what’s the point of this rambling? Well, I’ve just found a new bit of Windows software called CPSiteSaver.

It’s a little application that will connect to cPanel and fetch the latest backup of your web site, and more importantly also any databases you have.

A lot of web sites are driven by server side applications like this blog you’re reading now (WordPress). And everything is database driven.

For instance, this website could be restored from the original WordPress downloads in about 15 minutes tops from the original files, but all of the articles are stored in the database. If I lost the database, I’d lose everything.

And that’s where CPSiteSaver comes in. All you need to do is plug in your details – domain, cPanel userid and password, etc., then set a time you want it backed up and away it goes.

Of course it only works if you leave your PC on all the time. If you don’t want to do that, then it’s not suitable for your purposes.

As I do leave my PC on all the time (Windows Server), it’s perfect for me. I set up the domains once which takes a couple of minutes for the domain and then to look up all the databases that need backing up too. After that, it’s all on autopilot.

And this is what computers are all about. I shouldn’t have to manually take backups, it should just happen, and now it does.

I’m not going to go through all the features and benefits, I’ll let the sales page do that.

Equally as important though is the level of support. I’ve found the site owner, Manny, to be very helpful with the couple of issues I’ve raised with him.

I highly recommend it if you value your website at all. Here’s the link again, CPSiteSaver.

I’ve just completed part 1 of testing for my new digital delivery software, SmartDD. My developer partner Paul has done an amazing bit of coding in a very short time, and I’ve been going through the slog of testing it over the last 24 hours or so.

It’s turned up a few minor issues which are more to do with our understanding of what should happen under different circumstances rather than real bugs.

The fact that there are so few is a minor tribute to my initial spec., but mostly Paul’s incredible coding skills.

It just goes to show what you can do when you think something out properly before doing even one jot of coding.

Aren’t we clever? And aren’t I feeling smug at the moment?

Of course, I could have all that smugness wiped off my face if I can’t get the website up in time for the launch on 3rd October.

And there are a couple of things need coding in now, but the big hard part of making PayPal work is done. We now just need to decide how to handle the various payment_status types other than “Completed”.