Network Solutions - The Resolution

Domain Name Wire reports that the WebLock program will be opt-in rather than opt-out. The report also notes that the email was sent to 49 customers.

Phone Call

I got a phone call from Network Solutions, where they acknowledged that the wording of the email wasn’t good. They’ve had meetings about the wording of that email, the caller said.

I said that I didn’t want the feature. So the person who called me had a quick script to go through where I had to acknowledge that I understood what I was declining. The phone call took about two minutes in all.

My Next Step

I’ll be transferring my domain names. Probably to Hover.

Over the past 24 hours I’ve had lots of registrars recommended to me. The upshot seems to be this: they’re all good except for GoDaddy. People recommend Namecheap, PairNIC, Gandi.net, Dreamhost, and Dynadot.

Which doesn’t give me a clear answer — until I take into account Hover’s long-time support of the podcast community. (I’m a listener and a podcaster. No, they haven’t advertised with me, and I haven’t asked them to.)

Questions

People have asked me a few questions (or had misconceptions):

Do I host my sites at Network Solutions?

No. They’re at DreamHost. (I’ve been there for about 10 years and they’ve been great. This site is fast. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that it’s a statically-rendered site.)

The name servers are also at DreamHost.

Which domains were involved?

ranchero.com and inessential.com (this blog). The email didn’t specify which domain would be getting the WebLock program. It could be both. I don’t know.

What kind of traffic do I have that would get me noticed by Network Solutions?

Domain Name Wire reported yesterday that this service was going to “approximately 1 percent of Web.com’s customers.”

I have no idea how Network Solutions would know how much traffic I get.

My stats app Analog tells me that inessential.com had 2,270,357 requests for pages in December 2013, which was a typical month. I don’t know if this counts RSS feed requests. Presumably it doesn’t count images and style sheets and similar.

(I’m sure I sound terribly old-school by now: Network Solutions, DreamHost, and Analog. But that’s just because I haven’t felt a need to make changes. Until now.)

Was I unaware that Network Solutions indulged in less-than-stellar practices?

I was not unaware. I stopped registering new domains there in 1999. But I hadn’t felt it necessary to transfer my domains. (Not least because my time is best-spent writing code.)

The Internet Machine

So what happens when something so obviously inflammatory is posted?

My initial tweet was retweeted 293 times and favorited 47 times.

My blog post had the top spot on Hacker News for hours yesterday. It also appeared on Slashdot and on Reddit’s Technology page.

This blog got 2.8 times its normal traffic. (I don’t have ads. And I’d way rather people came here to read about something cool or something I made.)

I spent some time reading comments. My favorite — because I’m a software developer — was this one: “I was really pleased with the instantaneous load of this blog.”