Afilias and HiChina Form Partnership to Identify and Support Chinese Brands for ICANN New TLD Program

Webmaster Toolbox – SINGAPORE – Afilias Limited, a global provider of Internet domain name registry and Managed DNS services, today announced that it has entered into a formal agreement with Chinese Internet services leader HiChina, a subsidiary of Alibaba.com, to help Chinese brands take advantage of ICANN’s forthcoming New TLD Program.

The agreement recognizes HiChina’s leadership and customer service excellence, and names HiChina as Afilias’ preferred new TLD partner in China. Chinese brands who intend to establish a dot.BRAND presence online will benefit from the combined resources of Afilias, a global leader in new TLD registry services, and HiChina, a trusted Chinese market Internet expert. Read more

Afilias Launches Hunt for Ads featuring .INFO Domains

Web Hosting Services – DUBLIN, IRELAND – Almost nine years since .INFO first appeared on the Internet, registry operator Afilias is giving Internet users an incentive to search out and send in .INFO sites used in advertising. In its month-long contest called “.INFO Spotting,” Internet users who find and share photographs of these .INFO sites in action can enter to win one of this year’s hottest commodities – an iPad 16INFO contestGB.

“.INFO has long established itself as a useful and intuitive domain, as shown by the millions of live sites in use around the globe and the growing use of .INFO addresses in advertising of all sorts. To highlight the use of .INFO, Afilias is putting out the call for the Internet public to help us recognize the wonderfully creative work that .INFO site owners are doing to promote themselves,” said Roland LaPlante, Chief Marketing Officer for Afilias. Read more

Afilias Limited Acquires .Mobi Domain Registry And Expands Market Leadership

Web Hosting Tools – Dublin, Ireland – Afilias, a global provider of Internet infrastructure services and the registry operator for .INFO, today announced that it has acquired mTLD Top-Level Domain Ltd., the sponsoring organization and registry operator for the .mobi top-level domain. Under terms of the private deal, Afilias Limited, an Irish Limited company, has acquired all of the issued and outstanding capital stock of mTLD Top Level Domain Ltd. (known publicly as dotMobi), and plans to continue operating dotMobi as a wholly owned subsidiary.

“Afilias has long been a leader in launching new TLDs and now supports over 50 percent of the entire universe of registrations in TLDs launched since 2001,” said Hal Lubsen, CEO of Afilias. “Our acquisition of dotMobi reflects our long term commitment to the success of the TLDs we support and the communities they serve. We are particularly proud of the global success of the .mobi domain, and look forward to working with the dotMobi team and the mobile community to build on this solid base.”
Read more

Afilias’ Matt Pounsett Elected Director-at-Large for DNS – OARC

Webmaster News – Dublin, Ireland – Afilias, a global provider of Internet infrastructure services, today announced that Matt Pounsett, a lead member of the Afilias Content Propagation and Resolution Services team, has been selected as a board member of the DNS Operations, Analysis, and Research Center (OARC).

The DNS-OARC is an organization that provides a platform for the DNS operations community to share information and data. It also measures performance and traffic load data to provide short and long-term analysis in order to learn and develop remedies to attacks and other problems affecting the DNS. Read more

Afilias Launches Awards for the Best .INFO Web sites

Web Host Blog – DUBLIN, IRELAND – Today, Afilias announced the opening of the 2009 .INFO Awards. The awards, first created in 2006, rewards the best professionally created .INFO Web sites from around the world. .INFO Site owners are able to submit their .INFO site for consideration until 11:59 p.m. on October 23, 2009.

Sites will be judged in two parts. First a panel of judges, to be announced in mid-October, will create a shortlist of final contenders based on select criteria. These criteria include: presentation of content, functionality of the website, design, usability, and originality. The shortlist of the top ten best sites will then be published at www.info-award.info on November 2, 2009, at which point members of the public will be allowed to cast their vote for their favorite site. Public votes will be combined with judges scores to determine the final top three winners.

Read more

Afilias Managed DNS Services Adds SiteCertain to Keep Watch on your Web Site

Web Hosting Services – DUBLIN – Afilias, a leading provider of Internet infrastructure services, announced the availability of SiteCertainTM, a new add-on feature to its Managed DNS Services. SiteCertain enables Afilias Managed DNS customers to add web server monitoring, content monitoring and IP address fail-over to their Managed DNS account, to ensure the reliability and uptime of their Web sites.

“Customers using the Afilias DNS network already have 100% reliability guaranteed for managing their DNS. Now with SiteCertain, customers can add the peace of mind of knowing they will always have an emergency failover plan to handle a variety of scenarios, such as web server failures or problems with properly loading content, that would preclude customers from reaching their website,” said John Kane, Vice President of Corporate Services for Afilias.

Read more

Afilias Seeks New TLD Partners

Web Host Services – Dublin, Ireland – Afilias, a global provider of Internet infrastructure services and domain name registry technology, today announced that it is seeking to partner with a select number of organizations that wish to apply to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) for a new top-level domain (TLD).

“Afilias has supported more successful ICANN bids, and helped launch more new TLDs than any other registry services provider,” said Hal Lubsen, Chief Executive Officer at Afilias. “We are looking for organizations, corporations, and communities who can leverage our experience, financial and marketing resources, and technology to develop successful generic and community TLDs in English or other languages for Internet users around the world.”

Read more

Afilias Secures Millions of Internet Domains From BIND 9 Vulnerability with DNS Diversity Strategy

Web Hosting Tools – Dublin, Ireland – Afilias, a global provider of Internet infrastructure services, today announced that its DNS network, which supports approximately 10 percent of the Internet’s domain names, is secure from the recently announced BIND 9 vulnerability that could cause a denial of service (DoS) attack against DNS name servers. Afilias’ network and customers are protected by its DNS diversity strategy, which avoids single points of failure like sole reliance on a single DNS resolution software such as BIND.

“Afilias has a fundamental security strategy in place across our DNS operations that integrates diversity at every layer of our infrastructure. Most critical to this strategy is ensuring diversity in DNS software,” said Ram Mohan, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. “An organization can build bigger hardware or expand its geographic footprint, but by running a single type DNS software, whether open source or proprietary, they will always be completely vulnerable to zero day exploits like the one revealed this week with BIND.”

Read more

Afilias Launches New ‘Deals’ Page To Highlight Special .Info Domain Sales

Web Hosting Services – Dublin, Ireland – Afilias, a global provider of Internet infrastructure services and registry for the .INFO domain, today announced that is has added a new service aggregating .INFO Authorized Registrar special offers and sales on .INFO domain names.

The new “Deals” page allows Internet users interested in purchasing .INFO domain names to keep track of the latest registrar deals, sorting special offers either by date or registrar name.

Read more

35 .ME Domains Go To Auction

Webmaster News – Podgorica, Montenegro – Today, the .ME Registry announced a partnership with Sedo to list 35 of the most desirable .ME domain names at auction. Online bidding for these names begins March 26, 2009 and remains open until April 02, 2009.

“The dominance of the ‘ME generation’ in today’s marketplace requires online brands to interact with their customers on the most direct level, offering personalized products and services,” said Predrag Lesic, the registry’s executive director. “Call-to-action dot-ME domains, like the ones offered in this auction, are the perfect way to make your statement and stand out online.” Read more

Next Page »