What do you do when you find yourself with a bad domain name register? Do you cry, take your ball, and go home? No, you issue a complaint and I’m going to tell you how to do it.

Plus what are the differences between some of the domain name terms you see everyday? All that domain name goodness, plus some Web hosting thrown into mix makes for the 80th edition of the Web Hosting Show.

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Welcome to the Web Hosting Show, the number one Web hosting podcast out there today. I am the .htaccess to your Web hosting directory, Mitch Keeler. As always the bandwidth for this podcast is provided by WebHostingChat.com so please be a good Web hosting patron and check them out as well.

I recently changed up my own blog some in the style department, and I am considering doing the same for WebHostingShow.com. Now that I have several jobs and projects going, I might not have time to do it all in one day though. This is where you come in though, what would you like to see “go away” or “come into” the new layout? I can’t promise a date that everything will be finished, but I can say I’d like to get it rolled out before the two year birthday of this podcast. So if you have an opinions on the matter, please drop me an E-mail at mitch@mitchkeeler.com.

Don’t start sending your ideas in yet though, because you have a podcast to listen to! Let us get things started like we always do with the latest Web hosting headline.

Web Hosting News and Views

Google’s Blog Hosting Gets Hacked

Google’s Blogger publishing service experienced an outage the week before last, which kept Blogger.com and the Blogspot hosting service offline for two hours.

A hacker broke into Google’s main official blog on Saturday, hosted on Blogger, and posted a false message stating that Google decided to cancel a joint click-to-call advertising project with eBay. Google patched the bug by last Sunday and removed the hacker’s message, but not before it went widely noticed causing confusion among Google observers.

In a short note posted on Blogger Status, Google stated a “network malfunction” caused the outage. Google reports that no data was lost during the outage.

In early 2003, Google bought Blogger when it bought Pyra Labs. Blogger was once considered a leader in the blogging revolution but, according to IDG News, they have been criticized by some for not enhancing and upgrading the pioneering service.

Web Hosting Site of the Week

I found another AJAX powered domain name searching tool. Domjax.com might take over as my favorite out of all the domain name tools I have found thus far.

DomJax.com is the domain name search engine that tracks your domain name searches, so you don’t have to keep searching, copying and pasting. The name DomJax is a clever combination of “Dom” taken from Domain and “Jax” taken from the term AJAX. Web 2.0 techniques like Ajax and Dom-scripting were embraced to help enhance usability.

After you type in the domain name phrase you are looking for, you are given a plethora of options to play with. Not one AJAX domain name search tool has this many links to play with and do research from. I would list them all here, but for the sake of time it would be best for you to just go check it out and see them all for yourself.

The interface is clean, the results are nice, and they even have a blog where you can keep track of the latest happenings.

Q and A with the Web Hosting Guru

So what is the difference between a parked domain and an addon domain?

Now a lot of Web hosting companies these days are allowing folks to host multiple domain names from one account. Now where most people get confused is when the Web host starts throwing out all these terms that do not make much sense to the regular Joe or Jane off the street.

So what is a parked domain name? A parked domain name is when a domain name is pointed at the same spot your standard domain name is pointed at. Lets say you have mitch.org parked on top of mitch.com. In this case, anybody who went to either domain name would be directed towards the same Web site. Depending on the URL you typed in, the URL in the address bar should reflect the changes.

So what is an addon domain name? This is a nice tool to allow Web hosting customers to host more than one Web site from a Web hosting account. I could have WebHostingShow.com and MitchKeeler.com both being two different Web sites hosted at the same hosting account. This is usually done by pointing the secondary domain name at a folder on your Web hosting account.

For more domain name goodness, you might go search the WebHostingShow.com archives for more information.

Now you know what you are really getting with your Web hosting account. Most Web hosts are not trying to confuse you with these terms. The problem is that most Web hosting folks don’t understand that these terms are not very “user friendly” to the general public. So, don’t hate the Web hosting players, hate the Web hosting game.

Web Hosting Tip of the Week

Speaking of questions, here is a question that I get from time to time about domain name registrations. What do you do when you have signed up with a domain name register that has gone bad?

For the sake of making things easy let me give you an example.

Sally signs up with a domain name registrar in South America, but she doesn’t know that because it looks professional and nice. The South American domain name register goes out of business six weeks later, and sill has control of Sally’s domain name. So, most would say, “Hey Sally, go find yourself a new domain name – your pretty screwed!” but that might not be the case.

That is about time anybody in this situation should visit the InterNIC Registrar Problem Reports. From there you can report your domain name troubles, and if all goes well you might get control of your domain name back.

This is a resource I am happy to share, because not too many people know about it. So if you or somebody you know have fallen victim to a domain name register gone bad, don’t just take it. You need to take action.

Final Web Hosting Thoughts

Well that is it for this week’s edition of the Web Hosting Show. If you want to interact with this podcast, it is easy to do.

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I am Mitch Keeler, and you have been listening to the Web Hosting Show, the number one Web hosting podcast across the nation and the one and only voice of the Web hosting world.