We are now officially flip-flopping on that position and will henceforth offer MyPrivacy.net whois control. Here's why:

Our two main objections to using whois privacy were that: a) if you are not listed as the Registrant of the domain name, then you don't really own it and b) your masked data will be escrowed by your Registrar, not your underlying data - so in the event of a Registrar failure (i.e. Registerfly), you can get screwed out of your names that are whois privacy protected.

MyPrivacy.net addresses those issues in the following ways:

For .com and .net domains you can optionally enter your "True Registrant ID" into your protected whois record, that way your address and contact info is privacy guarded, but you are still listed as the domain registrant and thus the true owner of your domain (we are still finalizing this for the thick registry whois like .org and .info).

Why Are We Doing This?

A couple of reasons:

Whois privacy is one of the most asked for features from our members, and since you know what you want, we can warn you about the risks, and we can try to improve upon the common implementation to mitigate some of that risk. We've done that here.

Second, after that whole wikileaks thing awhile back, we found ourselves being approached by other groups who were experiencing political pressure because of their online activities. It wouldn't seem right to help one when there's a media sensation in progress but then turn away other groups taking heat for doing similar things. Over the past year we began working with three groups in particular who work with a lot of NGO's and civil society organizations and now we have close to three hundred wikileaks on our hands, and most of them wanted whois privacy. (We created a separate infrastructure for it as well).

Who Should Use Whois Privacy?

We think there are a few cases where you may want to use it, including:

• You are a blogger or writing personal or sensitive material and you want to protect your privacy
• You are a start-up in "stealth mode" or you are registering some domains for a project you do not want to reveal yet
• You are registering personal use domains and don't want the spam, telemarketing and junk mail

Who Should NOT Use Whois Privacy?

We recommend against any business or ecommerce entity from using Whois Privacy because it tends to look scammy. If you're going to plug into the net and conduct business there, you need to be reachable, identifiable and accountable. Put your true contact info in your whois records.

How Much Does It Cost?

MyPrivacy.net costs $4.95/year when added onto our new DomainPlus package (full DNS, URL and email forwarding for $15/year) or DNS Hosting package. It is bundled with DNS Pro and Enterprise DNS (remember, we also bundle the domain registration fees at Enterprise Level as well).

How does this compare against other Registrars?

Register.com - 11.99/yr
DynDNS - $9.99/yr
Godaddy - $9.99/yr
Aplus - $9.99/yr

How Do I Get It?

If you're adding a new domain or transferring one in, simply tick on the checkbox to Add Myprivacy when you select your service level. To add it to an existing domain click on the Add-Ons link on the Domain Settings tab.

Under What Circumstance Will We Turn Off MyPrivacy?

Great question, and one you should ask any registrar providing this service. We will turn off MyPrivacy on the following conditions:

1. If ordered to by a court of law, here in Ontario.
2. If the domain becomes the target of a Registry sanctioned Dispute Resolution Proceeding
3. If the domain violates the easyDNS AUP
4. If the domain expires.

It must be a hassle, having some domains here, some over there, and dealing with the bargain basement outfits can't be a picnic either.

Now, there is no reason to put yourself through this added hassle: The "Domain plus" package from easyDNS is a fully functional domain registration or transfer, complete with DNS management, URL and email forwarding for $15/year.

Who should use Domain Plus?

It is perfect if you want to simply setup a domain and get it working with your web host, a blog or some third party app like Google mail. If there's no need for "redundancy overkill" like DNS anycast or failover, then you don't need to pay the extra money for those added capabilities.

How would you decide whether to use Domain Plus?

Ask yourself this question:

"If this domain were to go down for any amount of time, is anybody going to yell at me?"

If the answer is "probably not", then Domain Plus is the solution for you. (If on the other hand an outage of any duration or cause would cause consternation or inconvenience among: your staff, your customers, your readers or your boss; then spend the extra few bucks a year and go with a DNS Hosting package.)

At the end of the day Domain Plus is exactly what you need for personal blogs, non-mission critical domains, feeder websites, mini-sites or any other application that isn't holding up another piece of the Internet or your business.

Start registering  new domains or transferring your domain over with Domain Plus today…

We've updated the tutorial on our wiki at http://helpwiki.easydns.com/index.php/Using_our_easyRoute53_service as well as adding some more information on the interface itself.

A couple of points have come up, so we wanted to make it clear here on the blog as well :

1) our easyroute53 tool is just that : a tool. We are not partnered with Amazon in any way, nor does being a client with easyDNS automatically grant you an account with them. You'll need to set up an account with them through their system before configuring and using our tool. They provide the secret key, user info and so forth for their system.

2) simply enabling the automatic export/update function does not perform an initial export from our system to route53. You must perform a manual synchronization first to push an initial zone out to the Amazon servers. After that, changes you make to your zone through our system will automatically push out.

We've made that clearer in documentation now, and are sorry for any confusion that might have arisen.

Regards

easyDNS Support

In the interim, we added a new systems engineer here, and while it wasn't listed on his resume, Ranko came to Canada from Serbia with a girlfriend, Marija, who does a lot of c++ and mobile apps coding. She coded the easyIPCalc subnet calculator that we released earlier this year, and just over a week ago we turned her loose on the original easyWhois App source.

The result is a much needed breath of fresh air for the easyWhois iPhone App, adding in new features such as:

• Emailing the results of a lookup.
• Lookup History
• Bookmarks
• Snazzy new "look-and-feel"

If you haven't already, grab this whois client for your iPhone and never wonder again if LindsayLohan4President2016.com has already been snagged or not.

(And yes, I guess we really should get on Android version, shouldn't we?)

Since it's there, we may as well flog it. So if you're interested in Enterprise DNS, which includes the GeoDNS Beta, 4 Anycast constellations deployed over 25 POPs worldwide, more repositories for SVN hosting, 10 IMAP boxes (we're about to drop the DNS Pro level to 5) and access to 24×7 off-hours support, then you may be interested in upgrading to Enterprise DNS and trying it free for a month.

You may also be interested in knowing that we also bundle your registry fees on supported domains at the Enterprise DNS level, so those renewals at the registry are on us.

Take advantage of this offer now by going into your Domain Overview tab and on the "Service Management"line click on "Change"

Click "Change" to upgrade to Enterprise DNS

GeoDNS enables you to serve different DNS data based on four globally geographic regions:

1. North America (East)
2. North America (West)
3. Europe
4. Asia

This may be useful if you are streaming content from multiple datacenters or want to direct traffic from different parts of the world to different storefronts.

We've seen pricing on GeoDNS ranging from $200/month to $2000/month per record. We're not kidding. So after 14 years of always being called "easyDNS: more expensive but worth it" it's always a lot of fun for us when we can turn a pricing model upside down.

With this in mind, GeoDNS is available as a component of Enterprise DNS, which means you can enable it for as many records as you want inside your zone and it's included at $9.95/month. If your lookups exceed 5 million per month then our additional pricing kicks in at our $2/million rate.)

So now you can have geoDNS and Anycast DNS across nearly 20 global POPs and you don't have to do a mezzanine funding round to get it.

Because this is a beta feature, we are also turning up a free trial on Enterprise DNS. Any existing domain here can simply upgrade their domain to Enterprise DNS and try it out for 30 days.

To enable GeoDNS for your zone follow these simple steps:

If you're not already on Enterprise DNS level, go into your Domain Overview tab and on the "Service Management" line click on "Change":

After your upgrade, go into your Account Preferences and enable GeoDNS:

Once that's turned on, you will see a line appear in your Domain Overview module with your geozones, where you activate the ones you want to define:

Things to Know about using GeoDNS

Here are the caveats:

1. This is one of those circumstances where once you turn it on, you have to wait a few hours for all of the nameservers in our cloud to "clue in". We tried to eliminate all those "wait for this to kick in" choke points on the new system, but we have one here. Once the new config take place, all future DNS edits are instantaneous again.
2. Right now, dns4 doesn't support the geoDNS. If you use dns4 then those queries will be served from your "default" area. You could either remove dns4 from your delegation (leaving you with a measly 19 global POPs over 3 anycast strands) until we bring dns4 into line, or leave it knowing that a portion of your traffic will be unshaped and flow to your default zone. (The reason for this is because that the dns4 anycast constellation has a different underlying architecture requiring a different approach. We're working on that now.)
3. This is zone based geoDNS, you do not get "country level" granularity. Having said that, all DNS Pro level domains have country-level geotargeting built into the URL forwarding, and have for over a year. (The ironic thing is this: you will actually get higher accuracy from using URL geotargeting than you will from geoDNS, because with the former you see the remote clients actual IP, firewall or at worst a proxy; while with the latter you only see their DNS resolver, which could be anywhere.)

So there you have it. Take it for a spin, try it out, let us know how you like it.

Wanna protect your good name from having somebody erect a pornographic website on yourname.xxx?

Then fork over $300 and you'll be "protected" against that happening for 10 years.

It's called a non-adult sunrise blocking registration and the .xxx registry expects those of us who feel we have trademarks to protect to cough up the money for one.

It can also be called extortion and get used to it, because in one form or another every new Top Level Domain that trots itself out over the next few years is going to try this in one form or another until it stops working.

So if everybody wants to save a lot of time, energy and money the best course of action forward is to make it stop working now.

A few weeks ago I was invited to write a guest post on Domain Name News about the new Top Level Domain process and in it I posited that a buyer's strike in defensive registrations was inevitable. (The word from within a hopeful Top Level Domain provider was that "Jeftovic has pissed off a lot of people inside the industry with that blog post of his…") Before that I had also posted on my WebValueInvestor blog why most new TLDs will be failures and a waste of time.

When we discussed .XXX sunrise internally, the consensus was that we had a duty to offer the option to our members, which we are going to do. (We even asked some of our members who run adult websites and even they hate this new TLD and view it as blackmail).

With this in mind easyDNS will NOT be registering a .XXX blocking registration for itself.

Fsck that. It's extortion, it sucks and we're not going to play ball. If anybody is stupid enough to register easydns.xxx, we will view it as a bad faith registration that violates our trademark. As one of our lawyers was fond of closing his letters "Govern yourself accordingly". We encourage all our members to take a similar tack, and if enough of us have our marks diluted by this crap, we should form a class action and go after the registry itself and perhaps invite ICANN to the proceedings.

So, how do you like the new TLD business model now?

If you actually want to go through with this, the pricing is as follows:

Sunrise A (for adult trademarks): $300

Sunrise B (for non-adult trademarks): $200 

Sunrise B (blocking registration 10 years): $300

Landrush: we aren't going to support landrush because we detest new TLD landrushes. Ask us in six-months (if you aren't too busy filing sunrise claims in 20 other new TLDs)

If you actually want to do this (did we mention we're recommending against it?) then email support with your contact info and trademark data and we'll get it rolling.

One of the more common criticisms of the new interface we've been hearing back from our members is that the Domain Overview module was "too busy" with too much stuff  making it hard to find what you're looking for.

We hope this design enhancement alleviates this, by breaking all those links into several broader categories we think it makes the entire module a lot easier to use.

Before:

What do you mean you can't find what you're looking for?...it's right there...somewhere

And Now:

Hopefully better.

This should make managing your domains easier. Feel free to comment or get back to us with your thoughts.

To avoid any possible interruption to your service due to delayed reception of cheques, we strongly urge clients who have payments to make to take advantage of our secure online payment options, using Paypal or direct credit card processing through Internetsecure. It is very likely that mail sent as of today (May 30th) will be delayed by the strike.

In the event that you believe your cheque for service or domain renewal has been delayed by this strike, we ask that you contact us by phone or email as soon as possible, so we can determine what steps are necessary to ensure that DNS service, domain renewals and new domain registrations are not affected.

Unpaid invoices that have not been dealt with in this manner will be treated as normal, and services may expire.

Please contact us if you have any questions or concerns.

We have just completed an update to the webmail interface at https://webmail.easymail.ca

The interface has been tested and no functionality has been lost. This was more of a cosmetic update.
If you do notice any loss of functionality or have any feedback please do not hesitate to contact us and let us know.

As always, thanks for your continued support of easyDNS.