Blue Wave Concept's Blog

Should a business owner treat a domain name just as important as a physical business location or a carefully crafted logo?

A domain is, after all, a business’ own piece of Internet real estate. It reflects the brand and can even affect the website’s ultimate findability. Many business owners find themselves in a position to purchase that perfect domain, left to wonder about the value it could bring to the business as a whole … and how much it might cost.

In the throes of a website rebuild project of our own, we have been carefully considering buying such a domain. So, I turned to Sedo.com, a domain brokerage company, for some advice on how to approach this process.

“Many domain buyers, especially first-time buyers, settle for a domain either because it’s inexpensive or because it’s available to register on the spot — they often overlook how valuable a domain name is to the success of their online business and therefore they underestimate the importance of their online real estate,” says Kathy Nielsen, director of North American sales, Sedo. “In fact, a domain is exactly like physical real estate, in that location is to be considered the most important factor in the investment process. Just like most shop owners would seek out Main Street for their business location, an online business investor should look to find a name that is easy for potential customers to find and short and descriptive enough for them to remember.”

We see many companies attached to their legacy domains. These domains were not necessarily picked for great search findability or for its easy-to-remember value but rather an “ego domain” with their business name only. In many cases, a better domain could be a very real possibility.

Problem:
You are presented with an opportunity to buy what you think is the perfect domain to secure your brand and the ultimate findability for your company. What process should be taken to determine if the domain should be acquired (and for what price)?

Action Plan:

1. Source Search Data First
Check search volume for validity of exposure, at the same time checking your ego at the door. Use a trusted keyword tool such as Google’s External Keyword Tool (http://wsm.co/bREOyp).

This tool is accessible through your Google Adwords account but available to all, not just AdWords account holders. Look at three key indicators after entering the proposed domain name words:

Keyword and Related Phrases: Is your domain the only keyword- driven domain that gets good search volume? Take a look at other options.

Global Monthly Search Volume: How many searches each month are actually conducted on that keyword phrase? Will this help SEO efforts at all?

Exact match searches: Make sure to look at Exact searches for that phrase, not Broad Match. If someone types in the proposed domain words exactly and it has high search volume, this may be a good investment in a domain name presence.

2. Get a Domain Name Appraisal
Run a domain appraisal report to know the current market value of the domain.

Sedo is one company that, for $40.00, will return a non-biased report on the actual value of the domain. What factors are taken into consideration when valuing a domain name?

“Factors such as the popularity of the terms used in the domain, comparable sales, cost-per-click (CPC) keywords [included in the domain] and the length of the domain are all considered during an appraisal,” says Nielsen. “Of course, if a domain was previously being used by another business, the added value of established website traffic will also influence the pricing. Most importantly, an appraisal helps set a buyer’s expectations and allows them to better budget for the right domain.”

Other available tools for domain valuation include Valuate.com, EstiBot.com and SwiftAppraisal.com. Using several tools offers a good way to find an appropriate price range. Ultimately, however, a domain is as valuable as another party is willing to pay.

3. Check Your Risk Factors
Make sure you are not violating any trademark issues and exposing risk to your company — consider the consequences. You could spend time and resources defending your right to own the domain, and risk all of your work to build a brand to only give it away to the rightful trademark holder. Check out Domain Law at Sedo.com and USPTO.com to check if the domain name is already trademarked as a phrase.

Sedo Domain Law: http://wsm.co/bVOMo7
USPTO: http://wsm.co/aZz2U7

Also, be sure to check for any owners of the secondary extensions of the domain name — such as .org, .net, .edu or .mobi. Does this pose a risk to future growth over time?

4. Check Your Wallet
How fast will you recover your investment with the new bright and shiny domain? How much is too much to pay?

• How many sales, conversions or leads will you need to procure to make this investment worth the money, over time?

• Can you afford the money right now in cash without putting it on a credit card or financing the amount for the domain? If the answer is “no”, then you are probably not at a time in your business where it makes sense to purchase the domain.

• Does the domain name potentially become an asset of your company in the event that you sell at a later date? This may also bring inherent value to your overall business.

• Will the domain’s history (specifically, inbound links) aid in your marketing efforts with the new site to be created under that domain?

5. What is the Easiest User Experience?
Think about your current marketing efforts in offline areas such as print or radio. If you have a domain name with multiple keyword phrases or dashes, will this make it more difficult for the user/future searcher? Is the domain hard to remember or difficult to type?

Any domain worth purchasing should be easy to remember and simple in nature.

• Example: GoofOff.com or Goof-Off.com? If you see this domain on a billboard or a TV ad, will you remember to use the dash? What if you don’t own GoofOff.com? Searchers will likely be misled or confused.

• Does your domain have a keyword phrase or product description in the domain? GoofOffStainRemover.com and GoofOffSpotRemover.com are both longer domains but have a keyword imbedded into them. These domains point to a product as an industry leader. Both domains make a promise to the user as to what to expect on the site. GoofOff.com, however, could be anyone or anything, not necessarily a product.

Picking a domain can be as complicated (and stressful) as picking the name of your company. If you keep these five key factors in mind when hunting for your perfect domain, you will be able to not only weigh the hard numbers for search but also the long term emotional value of clean, elegant and high-valued domain name that will stand the test of time.

About the Author: Heather Lutze has spent the last 10 years helping business owners get their enterprises noticed on the Web by their target audiences. She is the author of “The Findability Formula: The Easy, Non- Technical Approach to Search Engine Marketing.” Visit FindabilityFormula.com for tools and resources to increase your site’s findability.

Unless you work in the industry, nothing seems to change from year to year when it comes to Web hosting. However, the past several years have ushered in a new era. No longer just a place to store websites, hosting now impacts Web business as a whole; including e-mail, e-commerce, communications, SEO and more.

Two hosting trends in particular — hosting in the cloud, and content delivery networks — have quickly become hot issues in the industry. They are, in no uncertain terms, two of the biggest developments the hosting industry has seen in years. Let’s take a closer look at both of these issues. It will not only help in understanding the current environment, but prepare you for what to expect the next time your company wants to address Web hosting in the boardroom.

SaaS in the Cloud
When discussing “the cloud” in the hosting industry, inevitably the term Software as a Service (SaaS) will also come up. In fact, it is SaaS that brings the most value to website owners. In short, the cloud offers software on demand — eliminating the need to store large amounts of data on-site which, for small businesses, can often be expensive and resource intensive.

“The trend of cloud computing — that is, applications and infrastructure moving away from the desktop and a private data center and into the cloud — means that the playing field is being leveled and the barriers between these different service providers are being broken down,” says Seth Nesbitt, VP of marketing, Parallels, a hosting infrastructure provider.

So how exactly can a website benefit from SaaS and cloud hosting?

The services provided are numerous, and growing — from e-commerce functions such as shopping carts and SSL certification to business-class e-mail and full-blown Web conferencing, Using the cloud, Web hosts can offer a range of business-critical services not previously available to any but the largest of businesses. This has taken the Web hosting industry from an afterthought to the realm of an essential business partner.

Parallels provides back-end services to hosting providers. According to Nesbitt, they have seen tremendous growth in the communication services that they provide — specifically, email and Web conferencing.

“We recently announced a new set of SaaS — one example is a Web conferencing service,” says Nesbitt. “Now, our Web hosters will be able to offer a very sophisticated Web and video conferencing service to their users.

“From your Web hosting vendor, you’re going to be able to portray your business as worldclass — just like we’ve seen with the shopping cart and the shopping experience. This trend of cloud computing will arm small businesses with the tools to compete in a very competitive marketplace.”

Still, many consumers are wary of hosting their businesses in the cloud. But, for many others, the bundled services are just too good to pass up. Often, obtaining these services from one provider can mean a lower price point than purchasing them individually. But more significant is the ease of operation for Web professionals. Having several business-critical components in one place, under one operator, removes much of the hassle and worry. In the cloud, someone else is charged with updates, upgrades and system patches. What’s more, should something go awry, the business owner often has one contact point to get the problem fixed.

“We are very quickly approaching a tipping point,” says Nesbitt. “Let’s face it, it’s already here. Ten years from now, nobody is going to ask, ‘Should I host my own enterprise application’ any more than you would ask, ‘Should I set up my own power generator?’ ”

Maximum Performance with Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)
While not new, CDNs are quickly becoming the go-to solutions in the hosting world — and that’s mostly due to higher-than-ever expectations from today’s Web users.

A September 2010 report by Equation Research titled “When Seconds Count” showed that nearly one-third (32 percent) of consumers will start abandoning websites if they don’t load within one to five seconds of landing on the page. Worse, more than a third (37 percent) said they would not return to a slow site — 27 percent would likely jump to a competitor’s site.

And, user expectations of fast load times is compounded by the fact that they expect resource-intensive content, such as streaming video and other interactive media. Add in the recent introduction of search upgrades such as Google’s Caffeine index and the evolution of the real-time Web and it creates a perfect storm for website owners. It’s more important than ever that our websites are available, fast and meeting the expectations of our users.

A CDN can have a tremendous impact on our online presences. Essentially, these systems deliver content on-demand through a network of hosting locations spread across locations (referred to as edge networks) to avoid bottlenecks of data being transmitted. The user gets a faster, better experience and the website owner can be assured of high availability and increased capacity for transfer.

For example, a website that hosts a gallery of hundreds of photographs can choose to upload the lot of them to their CDN. The images are then automatically uploaded to each of the CDN’s locations. Then, when a user clicks to view photographs on the website, they are being delivered from the nearest point-of-presence (POP). So, a user in Manchester would be pulling images from a London POP, rather than one located in Las Vegas, for example. The end result is a more seamless experience for the user.

But it doesn’t stop there.

“Servers can be uniquely tailored to fit certain solutions,” says Josh Ewin, director of marketing, Dedicated Now. “The Web server, for instance might have RAID 1 redundancy, a mid-range spec, then your database server could have RAID 5 or RAID 6 for improved input/output. A lot of folks are breaking out their content, like streaming video, images and even their Web pages, Javascripts and CSS files onto CDNs.”

In other words, CDNs allow for better allocation of resources appropriate to the task. Not only does a strong hosting environment affect user experience, but it can also have a sizable impact on a website’s ranking in the search engines. While Google’s exact ranking algorithm remains a mystery, website performance is most definitely part of the equation, on several levels.

“If you’re on a dedicated server, you need to at least be in that mindset to allocate funds in the near future to CDN,” says Ewin. “It not only enhances your performance and user experience but it’s also going to help with the SERPs. Your page load times will be lower.

“If you think purely on bounce rate, imagine if your page load time was 30 seconds as opposed to 5 seconds. Bounce rate is absolutely a key metric when it comes to usability and search engine ranking.”

Unfortunately, CDNs are simply not feasible for all Web enterprises — it comes with a cost. Prices can vary but business owners should expect to pay at least $200 per month, in addition to the cost of running a dedicated server. The good news is that dedicated server solutions are becoming more affordable. According to Ewin, an unmanaged dedicated solution can cost as little as $50-$65 per month. However, should you need a managed solution (if you are new to the hosting world) expect to pay around $150 per month.

Expect More
Web hosting has come a long way in just the past few years. Web business owners should expect more from their hosting solutions. From extended software services to high availability and lightning-fast page load times, Web hosts are much more than a simple place to store data. Increasingly, the hosting environment is becoming a critical component of overall Web success. Users are expecting more from your website than ever before.

Whether starting a new website or looking for new solutions for an existing site, know that Web hosts have plenty to offer and are willing to work with you as a business partner, not just a service provider. Make sure you get what you need, and what you pay for.

We’ve known we would run out of IPv4 addresses since 1981, when the Internet Protocol was standardized. The numbers dictate that there will never be more than 4,294,967,296 different IPv4 addresses. (4 billion and change being the number of combinations that can be made with IPv4′s 32 address bits). Before 1993, addresses were given out in very large blocksbecause of technical limitations in routing protocols. This limitation was lifted, but around the same time, the Internet started to become more mainstream, requiring more and more addresses.

This was also the moment the IETF realized that at some point, we’d run out of IP addresses. Its estimated date for the well to run dry was 2005. Although they got the year wrong, they were right about their notion that 32 bits wasn’t enough for the decades to come.

The invention of network address translation (NAT), which allows multiple systems to share a single address, has been credited for stretching the life of IPv4, but two other technologies were also very important. Variable length subnetting makes it possible to give different subnetworks the appropriate size address block, and ethernet switching made it possible to have much larger subnets, reducing wasteful subdivision of networks.

The well is running dry

Next year could very well be the last year that large Internet Service Providers can obtain IP addresses under the rules that have been in effect for more than a decade, however. Let’s have a look at the current state of the IPv4 address space first, and then see what’s in store in the near future.

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) keeps track of the IPv4 address space in what are known as /8 blocks (hereafter referred to as /8). This slash notation is simply a way to specify address ranges. A /8 is all the addresses starting with a given 8-bit value. There are 2⁸ (256) of those blocks, in five classes:

Class A: 0 - 127
Class B: 128 - 191
Class C: 192 - 223
Class D: 224 - 239
Class E: 240 - 255

Class D is used for multicast, where a single packet is sent to multiple receivers. Class E has been “reserved” since the dawn of time, so overzealous system designers have sprinkled their code with checks that refuse these addresses. It’s often only a handful lines of code, but there is no way to update all those systems before we need those addresses, so class E can never be deployed for general use. Class A holds three /8s that can’t be used. 0.0.0.0 refers to the default route, and taints the entire 0/8 block. 10/8 is used for private addressing, and the localhost address 127.0.0.1 makes 127/8 unusable. So that leaves 221 usable /8s in class A, B and C space. Their current status is 101 allocated, 92 legacy, and 28 unallocated.

Allocated means given out under (some variation of) the current rules by one of the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). Legacy are mainly the /8s given directly to the US government (about 10 of them) and the likes of IBM, Apple, DEC, HP, and MIT, or class B networks (/16s) given to universities and somewhat smaller organizations. The unallocated blocks are the ones that are completely unused. They represent the main source of free IPv4 addresses, forming the IANA global pool (graphical representation). However, in addition to the IANA global pool, each block delegated to a RIR has a little unused space as people give back address space, or larger amounts in the blocks that the RIRs are currently drawing new delegations to ISPs from. (We’ll ignore the fact that some end users also get addresses directly from RIRs for simplicity.) There is also unused space in the class B legacy blocks. Which brings the total amount of unused IPv4 address space, in millions of addresses, to:

So how far will those 788 million addresses take us? Basically, the amount of address space given out per year was 10 /8s in 2005 and 2006 and nearly 12 in 2007 and 2008. Assuming no big changes, that would give us almost four years before we’ve used up those remaining 788 million addresses (47 /8s). However, there is a deal between IANA and the RIRs that each of the RIRs gets one of the final five /8s. When the global pool reaches five /8s, each RIR gets one, the pool will be empty, and that’s that.

The RIRs maintain nine months worth of address space. When they dip below that, they request two new /8s from IANA. For ARIN and the RIPE NCC, that’s around two /8s, but for APNIC it’s more like four, as APNIC needs to satisfy the insatiable thirst for IPv4 addresses that China has developed in recent years. LACNIC uses about half a /8 in nine months, and AfriNIC only a couple million addresses.

So in two year’s time, the RIRs will get their final /8s. At that point, the situation for each of the five RIRs will be very different. Because AfriNIC has such a slow burn rate, it will be able to continue business as usual for a good number of years, unless Africa suddenly starts using up a lot more address space. The situation for LACNIC will be similar, but to a lesser degree. The three other RIRs will have about 1 to 2 years worth of regular address space and used scraps in legacy space left.

But… the question is whether the RIRs will have the courage to continue burning the address space they still hold when it’s clear that they won’t be receiving any more. ARIN will. “Yes, ARIN will continue to provide address allocations to ISPs as long as it has address space available,” says ARIN president and CEO John Curran. “ARIN will set aside a ‘/10′ address block from that final block which will only have allocations made out of it for purposes of facilitating IPv6 deployment, but the remainder will be made available.”

I’m not so sure. The trouble is that the address allocation policies for each RIR are set by the “community”. Having followed this process for the RIPE and ARIN regions for some time in the past, I think it’s very likely that new, more restrictive policies will be created as the amount of free IPv4 address space dwindles. So we are more likely to find ourselves in a situation where there is (some) IPv4 address space left, but almost nobody will be able to get any of it because the bar is set so high. In fact, some people argue that we’re already there, as large telcos forego using public address space for things like 3G service without even bothering to try to get sufficient address space for these services.

Considering the fact that only one percent of the 2,500 or so ARIN members get more than 80 percent of the address space that ARIN gives out, it makes sense for the other 99 percent to push through a policy change that effectively makes it impossible for the broadband ISPs and wireless carriers to get more addresses, allowing ARIN to continue operations at 20 percent capacity for years to come. Of course, when the one percent fat cats see this coming, they may go for broke and put in a last, huge request. The RIRs do check requests, but they have little recourse against consistent lying.

In the long run that won’t work for ISPs, because invariably, they’ll need to come back for more address space. At this point, the RIR checks whether the previous allocations are used in accordance with the policies. If not, no new addresses. Of course this mechanism doesn’t really work for a last request.

When we reach the point that the half-million or larger blocks that the big ISPs need are no longer available, or are too hard to get, it will still be possible to get the small blocks of address space necessary to host services, so services can probably stay on IPv4 indefinitely. The ISPs, on the other hand, need a continuous supply of fresh addresses to connect new customers.

Some have suggested that making IP addresses a tradable commodity could solve this problem. Apart from the question of whether entities such as the US government (150 million+ addresses) and HP (33 million addresses) that have been sitting on huge amounts of addresses deserve a huge windfall, I don’t think this will work. Someone who wants addresses for a 19″ rack full of servers in a data center will be happy to pay $1, $10, or even $100 per address. The Comcasts, Deutsche Telekoms, and Softbanks of this world will never pay anything like that, even if they were prepared to buy dozens of small blocks rather than get whatever they need for (pretty much) free. Also, if HP wanted to sell off 16/8, the addresses that were once given to DEC, it would have to perform a huge audit to make sure there aren’t any firewall rules or application filters that treat 16/8 as special before it could release these addresses. So the price of the addresses would at least have to cover such an audit.

Either by choice or otherwise, the big ISPs will soon have to stop giving each customer an IPv4 address of his or her own. Giving those customers just IPv6 is not an option, as the majority of the services are still IPv4-only and many IP-capable devices that don’t run a full operating system (smartphones, VoIP phones, webcams) don’t support IPv6. So that means stretching the existing IPv4 addresses in some way through “carrier grade NAT” (CGN).

But won’t existing IPv4 users be sitting pretty? Maybe, maybe not. Some ISPs may take away addresses from existing users to provide their CGNs with enough addresses. Client-server applications such as the Web and e-mail will work just fine through CGNs and IPv6-to-IPv4 translators, but peer-to-peer applications such as VoIP and BitTorrent, not so much. Maybe the ISPs will care about that, maybe not. Even those of us who still have unencumbered IPv4 addresses at that point will start feeling the pain, as more and more of the peers we want to talk to are sitting behind largely impenetrable CGNs.

So enjoy your peer-to-peer applications while you can; their expiration date will be coming up not long after 2010.

The “Infinite Dial” research series by Arbitron and Edison Research finds in its latest survey that the Internet is becoming so important to people’s lives that many people would rather do without TV than without the Internet – should they have to make such a choice.

The Internet has become such an important component of people’s lives that it has surpassed TV as the “most essential” medium, the latest survey found. For the first time more people would choose to eliminate television from their lives than the Internet if they were forced to choose. When presented with the ‘false choice’ of either never again watching television, or never again accessing the Internet, slightly more people would eliminate television. Just over 49% said they would eliminate television, compared to a little over 48% who said eliminate the Internet.

“When we first asked this question in 2001, the spread was 72% for eliminating Internet and 26% for eliminating television – the shift over these nine years has been steady and profound” said Edison Research president Larry Rosin. Bill Rose, Sr. VP of Marketing at Arbitron added, “If you look at those Persons under age 45 the gap towards eliminating television is much greater.”

These findings come from a national survey of 1,753 persons ages 12 and over. This is the 18th in a series of studies Arbitron and Edison have conducted since 1998 on topics relating to the Internet and New Media. The complete study will be presented in a webinar on April 8th at 2:00 pm ET and interested parties can register at www.arbitron.com or www.edisonresearch.com.