Last month, a blogger friend asked me if I could help him to renew his domain name and he would like to transfer it to me. I said, OK, it’s not a problem. He previously had the domain name registered under a domain reseller, who is also a blogger based in Penang.

So, this domain reseller contacted me and said that my friend, his client, wanted to transfer the domain and he asked me to pay him RMXX. I replied and said that I just wanted to transfer the domain from his name to my name and this should be free but how come there’s this RMXX fee? The guy told me it’s for a year’s domain renewal and a year of hosting.

I replied and said that I don’t want any hosting and why should I pay him the renewal fee when I am going to register it under my name with my regular registrar?

I told my friend about it and my friend called this guy up who agreed to let us transfer it for free. After all, we are not subscribing to any of his services, right?

So I initiated a transfer and as you know, an EPP is required for domain transfers. Soon after, I emailed this reseller and told him to send me the EPP so that I could complete the transfer. That was on 20th November, 2008. I emailed him twice and he did not respond. I told my friend that I am unable to communicate with him in early December. Since that day, my friend has called him on the phone, which again, he agreed to provide the EPP code.

I checked with WhoIs just now and this domain has already expired on 10th December, 2008. WTF is wrong with this guy? Is he doing business or not?

You know, a little while back, when another friend asked me if I know of a cheap host, I gave him the details of this reseller and said that his rates are really cheap and that my friend (the domain owner), has been pretty satisfied with the services. I am so glad that this friend did not host with him and instead, opted to host with another company.

This domain reseller is really shortsighted. While he may not have earned anything this round, even though he has held my friend’s domain name for a few years and did all the renewals and such, which I am sure he made a small profit from, he would be able to gain some business if my friend and I recommend his services to our friend’s right?

Now, with so many problems, who would want to recommend him? Not only would we not recommend him, he’d be lucky we don’t smear his reputation!

If you have many websites or use a server, you may want to know instantly if something is not working right. Many of my friends make a living online and they have more than fifty websites, forums and blogs and some even have dedicated servers.

I have often wondered how they are able to monitor all these sites and know when these are down. As you know, downtime costs money. And let’s not even talk about the money his not earned during downtimes.

This morning, I came across this website monitoring service, SlashDot, and which is free to sign up but charged based on the number of URLs or servers monitored.

By subscribing to this service, you will be able to know instantly when your site(s) or server(s) are down via SMS text message. Each SMS received will cost you EURO1 only.

Another benefit of subscribing to the web monitoring service of SlashDot is that you could set the frequency of monitoring your web properties and pay a flat monthly fee only. I think that for companies and even individuals with a slew of sites, it is well worth the money for this instant information on downtimes so that appropriate action could be taken to reduce downtime.

The other day, I wrote about a worm that affected Facebook users via private messages and link sharing because the nature of social networks and the success of it depend on “trust” among members of a community.

Because these private messages or shared links seem to come from our “friends”, we don’t give it a second thought clicking on them.

Anyway, recently, I have been posting links on my Facebook account via link sharing and private messaging and each time I am required to pass through word verification, or some people call this Captcha.

I hate it because I could never get this right the first, and sometimes second, time and it’s a waste of time to me. However, if Facebook thinks that this is a good deterrent then by all means put it in place. After all, the most important thing is the security of the website and safety of its members.