Web 2.0.11562 beta

The IDN market that did not seem to exist last year is seeing activity every week now. Some sales from this past couple of weeks:

???.com (Nagaski in Japanese) for $2,300
Arbeitsverträge.de (Working Contracts - German) for $3,153
??.com (Home improvement Chinese) for $12,000
Más.com (more in spanish) for $3500
?.com (hair in Japanese and Chinese) for $6000
Natación.com (swimming in spanish) for $5729

These and others are recorded (with the story reference) here: http://www.idntools.net/idnsales.php

I notice someone bought ??.com for $600 even though its not really in any language?? Makes you wonder, huh….

Also it’s been reported in IDNforums.com that Yahoo! Japan began returning IDN results in their search engine this week. A Japanese blogger reported searching for Shibuya station ??? and the IDN version.com pops up as #3 in the results…. a harbinger of things to come I’d say.

Welcome back to me! I’ve been offline for some time now thanks to the negligent behavior of Interland / Web.com. Even now, looking back I am astonished at the poor decisions made and the complete lack of sensible processes. The result of this ridiculous saga was that considerable damage was done to my hosting business, to the businesses of many of my customers, and no doubt to other hosting resellers. This story is going to take a while to tell, but I intend to tell it in detail, in order to spare others from making a costly decision to trust their web hosting businesses to Interland / Web.com. I’ve been in the web hosting business for years, but I’ve never seen anything like this.

It started out with the acquisition of Web.com by Interland corp. For those who don’t know, web.com has a strong, high-margin business selling third level domains, e.g. yourname.web.com. I suspect the Interland decision-makers calculated that this business, which has only marginal costs, was a cash cow worth getting even if it required incurring some liabilities by driving out resellers. The reseller models of these 2 companies were not compatible; indeed the reseller accounts options dissapeared from the website after the acquisition. As soon as Interland took over the reigns, a mass migration of accounts ensued from which some accounts would never recover. Stay tuned for the next installment, where the damage and destruction begins.