Acro.net – Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

It’s surreal and funny at the same time; I just deposited $100 into my Fabulous.com account in order to renew some domains.

Most of the time, I pay with a credit card, but on occasion I’ve deposited funds via PayPal.

When the email receipt came back, it said that the recipient of the funds was eNom.com. The PayPal email was pay@fabulous.com :

“You’ve sent a payment of $100.00 USD to Enom Inc, and you’ll be billed with Bill Me Later®, a PayPal service through your PayPal account.”

My deposit is still pending – all while the funds have left my PayPal account.

I’m aware of eNom managing back-end functions for Fabulous but this looks like a glitch thus far. Will update when I hear back from the Fabulous.com support.

Recently I had to change the CNAME records for several domains in order to point them to an online venue.

In the past I used eNom but as I moved the majority of my domains to Fabulous.com I wasn’t familiar with their bulk tools.

Fabulous offers a DNS Template feature, that allows you to apply a profile (“template”) against a number of domains.

I created the template, adding CNAME records for “www” and “@” and saved the template with a name of my choice.

To use these features, domains at Fabulous must use the myns1 and myns2 DNS pair. As it’s not a preset profile on Fabulous, I had to create a new nameserver profile, adding those two to it. It took me 1 minute, literally.

The next step was to bulk edit the DNS for the domains, so I pasted my list of domains into the relevant box and applied the new DNS profile to them.

Once this was done, the final step was to apply the DNS template to the domains. In 5 short minutes I was thus able to switch and point my domains in bulk to the venue of my choice.

Fabulous offers many more features, including a security fob that I reviewed in the past. Check it out!

While onto the 3rd year of using Fabulous.com as my primary domain registrar, I can’t but praise the Australian company for their efficiency and support.

Fabulous.com offers paramount domain security and they are proud of their ability to offer the famous Fabulous fob, which I enjoyed reviewing a while back.

The dedication with which Fabulous.com addresses customer issues was not restricted to legendary Mike Robertson, who has since moved on to form Domain Guardians.

Two days ago I had a special request about a custom report on my 2010 transactions at Fabulous and after emailing my account manager I hoped for a response that would not take longer than 3-4 business days. It’s tax time once again and accurate presentation of data to Uncle Sam is crucial.

To my pleasant surprise, Fabulous.com sent me a detailed report the following day, despite the 12-odd hours of time difference between them and US East Coast.

I could not be happier with this speedy response and once again I’d like to recommend Fabulous.com to any domainer that is serious about using a solid domain registrar for their domain portfolio.

A little over a month ago I posted about how a domain name that I own received 2,500 WHOIS queries at the Registrar, Fabulous.com

In a nutshell, Fabulous.com keeps track of the number of WHOIS lookups for domains registered with them and lists those numbers alongside the domain’s expiration date, inside your account control panel.

It’s obvious that domains that are looked up the most are usually monitored for pending availability by third parties and are entered into a number of droplists.

My little experiment so far has piled another 450 WHOIS queries to the original 2,500 – all while the domain expires in 15 days from now. Originally, I planned to wait almost 3 months before posting an update here but I thought it’d be better to keep track of this milestone as well.

The bottom line: vultures are always out there checking out your best and most valuable domains; it’s great that Fabulous.com provides this type of information that can help you gauge the value of your domain names – and a reminder to renew them well in advance!

One of the benefits of using Fabulous.com as my primary domain registrar is the ability to instantly track the number of WHOIS queries a domain receives.

With the proliferation of aftermarket services, domains are often polled and queried; that’s an indication of popularity that can be used as a secondary measurement of traffic.

When domains approach their expiration date, such WHOIS queries increase; domains that are “due to expire” begin to appear in pending droplists of drop-catching services.

To put it plainly, the vultures are watching.

Thus, it’s good to be able to see what the vultures are planning and to be able to gauge the popularity and selling potential of your domain names.

I just sorted my list of domains that expire in March at Fabulous by the number of WHOIS queries and I was amazed to find that one of them has had 2,500 WHOIS queries with 55 days to expiry. I’ve seen numbers in the upper hundreds *after* expiration, but nothing quite like this.

I can’t imagine what the number will be with 30 days to go or even past expiry, but I think I will play a game with the vultures, just to experiment a bit with their food.

I will let the domain expire for at least 2 weeks before I renew it, to maximize the WHOIS query stats and I’ll post the results after I renew it.

See you on the same topic in three months from now