It’s 2008, and we just launched our new customer portal and blogs by me and Andrew Cruse, our CTO. In short, we are providing one interface that enables you to better manage your relationship with our company. From this central console, you can now reboot devices, view bandwidth graphs and backup reports, or view invoices. You can also create support requests, manage user permissions, and set maintenance notification preferences.

Managing user permissions is critical for our clients, especially those with compliance requirements. We also added a portal audit and logging feature that allows administrators to view what actions users took within the portal. An example of this in action would be to restrict access to your AP team to just viewing invoices while your IT team would have access to request changes to backup schedules, update firewall rules, or view facility access logs. I invite you to start using this valuable business tool.

Why start blogging now?

We hope to deliver invaluable information about Profitability.net and the data center and hosting industry and welcome your thoughts. Andrew Cruse’s CTO blog will detail technology we use and some of the cool things we are doing behind the scenes to ensure we over deliver on our promises to our clients.

Domains never tasted so bad…

Domains never tasted so bad for Network Solutions who is in the news for holding domains searched for from their site for five days. You can still purchase the domain from Network Solutions but you can’t buy it from other registrars during that time. I first heard about this from Adam Strong’s article at DomainNamenews. Network Solutions isn’t the first vendor to break a general sense of public trust regarding whois and they won’t be the last. Is this a case of good intentions gone awry? There are serveral posts from purported Network Solutions employees who claim this is an effort to protect their clients from “domain tasters.”

ICANN can eliminate domain tasting by simply removing the 5-day grace period for registrations. Furthermore, registrars should be specifically prohibited from using whois information to speculate and/or advertise on these domains. Pay to play at least changes the economics of domain tasting and eliminates the need for Network Solutions to further “protect” their revenue, err clients. To their credit, ICANN is currently reviewing domain tasting and released an initial report on January 7, 2008. Hopefully ICANN will make the right decision for the industry and eliminate this practice.

–Aaron Larkins