I have been writing a few articles about the SnapNames fraud that took place over the past five years. I speculated that DomainQueue selling domains to iREIT helped uncover the scam. And finally, I pointed out a few mistakes that Nelson Brady made while maintaining his domain portfolio.

Fire caused a major outage at Fisher Plaza Datacenter, impacting sites including Dotster, Bing Travel, and Authorize.net. When Auth.net’s systems go down, a lot of companies hurt. There is no word on whether or not Dotster hosting went down.
Fisher Plaza Datacenter Outage

ServerBeach is experiencing a power outage at their Virginia datacenter. It not only affected customer servers, but also their My Serverbeach portal, and thus the ability to create tickets. I am going on 7 hours of downtime on my primary server. Even though ServerBeach was started by Rackspace, I sometimes wonder during outages such as this if they ever had anything in common.
ServerBeach Outage

When I called eNom, their tech support rep tried to tell me it was a problem with the registry operator and how they display their data. Not as bad as the GoDaddy rep who told me I needed to pay for an upgraded “business listing” in order to update my whois record the day before.

I’m in the process of updating the whois on a lot of domains and noticed that eNom seems to be removing spaces from whois contact info. I’m guessing this is just a temporary bug in their system because domains that have not been updated recently are still showing normal-spaced whois info. Time to contact eNom support and see how long it will take them to escalate to a developer.

For the third time in about a month Snapnames has had a major system outage. The two outages that were most noticeable happened on weekends. While the outage notification e-mail from Snapnames says it is a vendor issue, the real question is why these outages so frequently occur on weekends and which party is not handling the support relationship correctly.
Snapnames Outage

Another brand protection company has completed registrar registration. With the large amount of trademark infringement in the domain space, it’s surprising there aren’t more brand protection companies filing to be registras.
Netenforcers

Had to dig up some historical domain sale and found two sites:

DNSalePrice.com - very very slow, but lots of history

NameBio.com - slick, but only 20% of the data on DNSalePrice.

I was really surprised that so few resources exist for this market. It would seem prudent that sites like Sedo and TDNAM would want everyone to know current sales prices. Either it is too much work, or they are worried expectations will rise even more, cutting out on their bread and butter, sub $1000 sales.

Have been having a lot of problems with iPowerWeb.com since they completed a server migration last weekend. Part of the move was changing PHP to run as a CGI script, and turning on an outbound firewall limiting outbound connections. This is important if you have a database located elsewhere, or if you want to do off-site backups. Dealing with their tech support has been difficult because shared hosting calls are directed to a non-technical call center in the Philippines, and they are not responding to trouble tickets. Moral of the story: shared hosting is not worth the hassle.

Looks like another multi-hour, prime time, core router problem at Dreamhost. At a certain point I would think that people would stop hosting with them. I have been migrating all my sites off of their servers since a series of server issues in the first half of this year. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to move a website.
Major networking issues