Posts Tagged ‘domains’

Cloudflare is a CDN (content delivery network) that sits in front of your web server and speeds up your website. They have grown in popularity because they offer a set of basic features as part of their free plan. Therefore, you can get started for nothing and see what you think.

Setup

It is easy to get set up with. You start by entering your domain and Cloudflare scans the DNS records for it. It then sets up all of the rules in its own system and you update your nameserver records to point at their server.

You choose which hosts go through Cloudflare and which do not. You move all of your DNS over to their system, but only certain parts (typically www and any static asset subdomains you are using) will flow through the Cloudflare CDN.

Speed results

I am resistant to make any recommendations here. I ran a couple of tests for Anxiety Leeds. A sample set of one project with a few tests run is not representative.

I first ran a test while the site was still running on my server with no CDN in front of it:

I then ran the same test again once Cloudflare had been set up. I got the same results: the time did not change.

However, when I tried it the next day I got much faster results:

Whether this was because it took Cloudflare a while to cache everything, or whether it was because it provides no speed benefits but my server was just faster at the time I re-ran the test, I am not sure.

When I ran the test a few weeks later, things were really slow:

However, I ran the test again immediately after and got completely different results:

DNS management

It is also worth considering whether you want Cloudflare managing your DNS. For example, you could move all of your DNS management over to Cloudflare and bypass their CDN layer. I use NameCheap for registering my domain names and they provide free DNS hosting, also. How to do the two compare?

NameCheap is great: they provide a redirect server and email forwarding. Therefore I use them for a lot of the domains where I want to implement those features as I get them for free. Their email forwarding service reliably delivers emails to my inbox.

Therefore, I usually stick with NameCheap.

Cloudflare does have one advantage, though. They support CNAME flattening on the root domain. When using Heroku, you have to CNAME your domain to theirs. However, you cannot CNAME the root domain (www.example.com works fine, but example.com does not) as this disrupts all of your other DNS records.

Cloudflare (and a number of other DNS providers, but not NameCheap) solve this by providing CNAME flattening in which they allow you to enter a CNAME, but they translate this into an A record that updates automatically. Because of this, I tend to use Cloudflare when using Heroku.

DNS speed

Another concern is the speed of Cloudflare’s DNS server. First, let’s look at a typical response from the NameCheap free DNS service.

30 milliseconds. That sounds fine. Now, compare that to one of my sites running on Cloudflare’s DNS service.

It is an eye-watering 813 milliseconds. That is almost an entire second just to do the DNS lookup. I immediately re-ran a few more tests on various websites, including on the same website again. The second time, it was much better.

6 milliseconds. It is also a big difference to the first result. Such discrepancies are concerning.

Conclusion

Can Cloudflare speed up your website? Based on the available evidence, no. However, this is one website that I ran five tests for. That is not a large enough sample to draw any conclusions from.

Second, it may be that I need to spend more time playing around with the cache headers on Anxiety Leeds to get the full affect. The documentation suggests I should not have to do this, but I am not convinced that that is the case.

For those of you who attended last year’s Secular Ball, you may remember that we did all the registrations though the website, SecularBall.org.

At the time we also registered SecularBall.com but those having come up for renewal, we decided only to renew the .org domain as barely anyone visits that, so having the .com isn’t even worth the $8 it would cost to renew it.

Anyway, someone recently sent me this email.

Hello,

I believe you’re the owner of secularball.org. I’ve got a proposition
concerning your website. Would you be interested in acquiring
secularball.com?

I understand that you may be concerned about the legitimacy of this.
If you’re a bit skeptical, I can upload an HTML page to verify
ownership beforehand. We can also use a third party escrow (who will
essentially ensure your money is safe until you retain complete
control over the domain name) for optimal security.

PS: I’m only emailing you because I believe you can benefit from this.
I do not intend to email you again unless you respond to this inquiry.

Regards,
Faheem.

It’s bad enough these lowly bottom feeders gouge out a living based on registering other people’s trademarks, but you would think that if you were in such a business you would have at least the basic common sense to do just a bit of research and see that we already were the owner of said domain until recently and obviously had no interest in it (or at least make reference to the idea of selling it back to us).

Until now companies had it pretty easy. You choose a .com domain although if you were a British company you may have had to choose between a .co.uk as well. Times like that are gone now however. Now businesses have to pick between extensions including .biz for all companies and .us for US companies.

The problem is that nobody wants an unpopular extension and if dot biz does not take off many businesses could be stranded with a useless domain. Although dot biz are gradually becoming more popular and its not lucking like one that will fade out any time soon; although the best option is often to play it safe.

Dot biz problems

Domain extensions have been launched many times with the hope of climbing to the success of the dot com. But none of them have done and my guess is that none of them will do any time soon. To be popular you had to be quick off the mark.

Dot net and not org were popular as they are very widespread and .co.uk has done very well too as it was out well before it was all the crazy to bring out your own domain extensions for your country. Back when nobody hard heard of dot tv, dot ca and dot us, .co.uk were selling like hot cakes; making them very cheap helped too.

The problem is though that dot biz was not quick off the mark. And many of the big websites had already set up sites when the dot biz sales doors where opened for business. Many large corporations who could have promoted dot biz already had dot com’s by then and were not about to change.

The dot com seems like the perfect extension too. It is spelt like it sounds, its not too short and its not too long. The problem with dot biz is that unless it becomes very popular people could easily confuse the spelling with bis. And no business wants some of its website traffic heading off to an address which does not exist.

Those names though

As will any new extension however people will be tempted by the fact they can get find a name shorter than a paragraph in length which hasn’t been snapped up already. While people are cueing up on services like SnapBack to get stupidly long dot com domains, it’s easy to find a great name that ends in dot biz.

There is no localisation on dot biz as with many other domains neither. For instance owning a dot us is great and your website visitors will love it – providing they all come from the US. But chances are they won’t be, and people who don’t live in the area your name is from could feel like an outsider. This is not a problem with names like dot tk as everyone feels like an outsider together ;). I mean how did an island that small get an internet connection let alone a domain name extension in the first place?

Conclusion

If your company name is available in a dot com then go for a dot com. Dot com is still and for a while yet will be the dominant name. However if you can’t get it then a dot biz looks professional and chances are you can get your name. If so I recommend that you go for it. After all the dot biz popularity grows every time a registration is made.

Just look around expired domain lists and domain auction sites and you will probably find an advert for “rare 3 letter domains.” However, there is a reason these are rare – nobody wants them! Who wants a domain such as www.h5l.com? It’s pointless. It takes longer to say that than www.freeservebusiness.com. Yet the second domain has 6 times more letters in.

Initials are not something that you want to go for. The ideal domain is likely to be one word. Two words is also ok as long as there is no dash between them. When choosing domains you are looking out for how few syllables you can have rather than how few letters you can have.

This is where initials drag your time up. Although they only have a few letters, each letter is a syllable so it takes a while to say them. A lot of popular website domains use one word with two syllables, such as www.google.com, www.mworld.us and www.yahoo.com.

When choosing a domain name or any web address for your website it is important that you get a memorable and snappy domain so people can remember it. There are also some things which you should not do.

Make it flow

One thing I think should never be included in domains is an “-“. They should not be put in. Take a look at these two examples:

www.bigcats.com
www.big-cats.com

Try saying them. The first one is simply “bigcats .com.” Whereas the second one is “big dash cats .com.” Much more complex and so much harder to remember. Domains are far more snappy if the words follow on without being broken up with dots and dashes. Why do you thing nobody has bought a .name domain?

Words not letters

Many people are going on about how they are selling rare 3 letter domains. The problem is that these domains are usually a mix of random numbers and letters. It’s much easier to remember a name than some random initials. Don’t just get the initials of your domain when its more complex. Get the full name.

Simple words

Not everyone is a great speller. Try to keep the words in your domain simple and try not to use words which are often spelt wrong. If you really must do this then you should buy up alternative spellings to your domain and set them to redirect to the correct domain name.

Back in the old days you could pick between all 3 domain extensions, .com, .net and .org. And each one would cost you £100 a year or over. Now you can pick between 100’s of domain extensions from .cc to .sk. And you can register domains from as little as £3 per year.

This causes problems though. Back in the 90s if you were looking for a website you hardy had to guess at the web site address because they were all .com’s. Now-a-days there are so many you may never find the correct site.

For instance, Worfolk Online uses 5 different domain extensions including .biz, .tk and .us. Guessing the address of M World if you didn’t know the address could take a while. How many extensions would you go through before guessing .us?

The trick is getting the compromise right. New extensions allow you to get a better domain name but you have a not so good extension. Whereas if you go for the classic .com, most of the good domains are taken but when you are looking for a website .com is and I’m guessing always will be the first extension people go to.

Buying expired domains can get you valuable visitors and an already strong standing in search engines and website directories. However if you pick the wrong domain you can lose traffic, popularity and reputation.

Search Engine Bans

Everyone hates those sites that occupy domains and have sites with one a homepage covered in Spam and paid for search listings links. And so search engines have various methods to counter the Spam pages with spoil results and annoy searchers.

One system that many search engines use, including Google, is to permanently ban Spam addresses. The ban can be appealed but this takes time and effort, which you really don’t want to be wasting. The key is to find out before you buy.

Research the owner

Does the previous owner, own one domain or one hundred domains? If they own loads of domains, the chances are that they will all be part of an interconnected Spam network set up to fool search engine spiders and generally annoy people.

Research the site

Check out the Way Back Internet Achieves (http://webdev.achieves.com) who spiders many sites and keeps records of how the website used to look since 1996.

Conclusion

Before registering an expired domain, make sure that you have researched it first. If you do you are likely to end up with a great domain bringing your visitors and search engine listings.