NetSpeak Technologies

It seems like it is 1999 all over again. Some of our customers and others we have spoken to are getting the Official looking Hosting Service bills and DNS or Domain Renewal or Domain change letters in the mail. Back in the day, this was a big problem and it appears the SCAM is cycling again.

NEVER renew a domain or even send money for Hosting Services from a letter you get in the mail or from a phone call. 98% of the time they are a SCAM

. Many of these letters are asking for you to sign and pay or sign, or just pay a hosting services or domain renewal and submit it back to them. The ones that are just asking for you to send money in for a bogus hosting service that sounda close to your current service or even mention your website name, is typically bogus. Once paid, your money is gone, you will never see that money again…it’s gone.

Some of these letters are so Official looking that you figure you should respond anyway. What some people do not do is read the small print or how it is worded, allowing them to TAKE control of your domain and lose it.

Find a company that  uses Domain Locking on all the domains it is in control of for no additional fees. This prevents random domain stealing. Check to see if your domain is locked and know who your domain Registrant really is. 

Not Sure who your hosting with or how holds the keys to your domain? Call your hosting company. Call YourHost.com if  they cannot answer the questions, regardless if you are a customer or not and our Technicians will help determine the validity of the letter and who is your real host and controlling registrant, like Tucows, Register.com, NetworkSolutions, enom, Godaddy, etc.

E – Staff 714 842-8511 Option 2 support

Sample of the Fraud Specimen

Blogging, Talk bogus, dns, domain renewal scam, domain stealing, hosting invoice scam, hosting scam, invoice, mailed hosting invoice, SCAMS, send a check for dns renewal, send dns renewal money, verify dns letter

Today, Monday September 10th, 2012, Godaddy DNS servers got hacked and Millions of GoDaddy customers websites and emails just stopped dead in their tracks.

As a rule, I have the utmost respect for IT services teams in most companies, especially when it is a large company like GoDaddy, as they have setup layers of  security and redundancies,  and still they get hacked.

I have empathy for the GoDaddy team and it appears that no entity is safe when it comes to politics and just plain pissed off groups that want to make a point at the expense of others.

It is sad the world we live in and I only hope that GoDaddy gets back on line and resumes its customers services.

CBS News Article

Eric Kirkhuff / CEO / YourHost.com

Blogging, Talk, Tech empathy, godaddy, hacked, politics

In February Digital Rapids announced that The Hill’s Pet Nutrition Primary Healthcare Centre at the Veterinary College at the University of Guelph uses 20 TouchStream appliances

for streaming and archiving video for students to review. TouchStream’s ability to stream and archive at the same time means veterinary students can remotely watch procedures
live or view them on demand later.This case study goes into further detail on The Center’s deployment of TouchStream and looks more closely at the practical and educational benefits
TouchStream has brought them.”TouchStream allows us to meet the learning objectives we’ve set out for our students and to expand our influence in veterinary medicine globally.”

Full Case Study RapidUsers_University_of_Guelph

Case Studies, Streaming

Try this brainstorming software that will work on PC or Mac http://www.xmind.net

Software

I am glad that I canceled my 14 day Free Trial.  I have been sick in bed for a few days and I wanted to learn some information that would be useful to my position as Technical Sales for YourHost.com. One of my pet peeves is to waste time and see others waste time.

Sometimes I buy from Amazon and other well known audio places just because they typically make everything pretty user friendly.  I was linked and referred by www.Audible.com a I knew of a book on Marketing I would like to hear but was wary of how it would load into my phone or just download and play,  but they wanted $7.95 to join, and then I stumbled upon a 14 day trial. The flow of signing up was not clear (my first clue) , so I jumped on a chat with a nice person from Audible and she showed me the link to sign up as they were not showing you anything until you put your Credit Card Info in.

I asked if you put your CC info there would be no charge for the first 14 days and what happened after that. She said it would be $14.95/mo. I said what happened to the $7.95? That is not there, it is $14.95. I also asked if the book was downloaded, can I get it easily to my iPhone and they said sure it will go into Itunes and you can get it on your phone. Wrong.

Ok so being sick I wanted to see what they had to offer and I downloaded a free book on marketing. I listened to half of it the first day and today I listened to part of the 2nd half, and I heard the guy talking about faxes and other things well made me want to check the publishing date to make sure I was getting the freshest information.  Publishing date 1994 …Really?

I saved two screen shots so you could see for yourself that I did not make any of this up.

The bottom line is if your going to offer something for free to entice for a long-term relationship, make it worthwhile that is current and can be used.

In summary, difficult to work with, and deceptive.

There were other reasons I cancelled but this was what irritated me the most.

P.S. I could not get the file onto my phone and so I downloaded the app from ITunes and I logged into Audible.com’s app and saw the file, but the download was disabled…. that did it, so I listened to it on my laptop….grrr

Customer Service, Marketing