How to change ownership of .NZ domains

There are three main "players" in a domain name. The registrant (the nominal owner), the registrar who sells the owner the domain name and the hosting service that provides web and mail services for it. When you buy a domain name, the owner definitely changes, and depending on the deal you strike, the other two players may or may not change.

Buying .coms is easy. You transfer them to your account (or get the seller to "push" them) at the registrar of your choice and the registration information is changed to yours. This includes the registrant, of the domain name.

Buying New Zealand domain names isn't quite so simple. Although both the .com rules and the DNC rules for the .nz name space recognise the rights of the registrant, the .nz ones are designed to protect the rights of the registrant as much as possible. You can easily transfer domains from registrar to registrar using a magic key called a UDAI, change nameservers through your registrar, and change almost all of the contact information through the registrar, but the one thing you usually can't change on-line is the registrant. Without changing that the name belongs to a greater or lesser extent to the previous owner.

The registrant can only be changed by your registrar and most registrars require a paper form signed by both the old registrant and the new. They typically also charge a processing fee of approximately one year's registration.

Strangely enough the DNC rules don't require these pieces of paper, but they have been written with some scary language that has discouraged most registrars from implementing on-line change of registrant. One registrar who has implemented fully automatic changes of registrant is Discount Domains and when I am buying or selling a new Zealand I much prefer to make the change of registrant and transfer via them.

The process is pretty straightforward.

• Both the buyer and the seller need to create an account at Discount Domains. They identify customers with an 8 digit account number and a password.
• The seller needs to know the buyer's account number, but not their password. Never give anyone your password.
• The seller selects the change registrant option from the domain management console and enters the buyers account number.
• Click OK a couple of times and the domain's transferred to the new registrant and will appear in their control panel.
• Once it's transferred, the buyer can leave it at Discount Domains, who are in my experience a thoroughly professional company, or transfer it to their registrar of choice.
• Regardless of where they intend to have your registration, the first thing the buyer should do is request a UDAI from their registrar and file it safely away.

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And where, you might ask, is the hosting company in this process? The simple answer is they aren't. Your web developer and hosting company provide services, they should be able to do everything they need for your domain by your setting the nameservers to their hosting. If they ever ask for your UDAI, ask why they need it, if they don't have a very good reason ask them for their nameservers and set your domain to use them. Apparently some web hosting companies make a practice of transferring domain registration to a registrar they are associated with for their convenience and this can lead to inflated registration charges, or result in the domain name being manipulated in a way that is not always in the best interest of the registrant.

Profiting From The Coming Recession

I won't say it was a first, but I received a very thought provoking unsolicited commercial email today. Not normal spam, but somehow my email address had got on a legitimate company's marketing list.

To an extent nearly everyone in an Internet business is dependent on advertising for our respective businesses' income. It doesn't matter if that revenue is from CPC/CPA marketing, building websites to advertise businesses, selling domains or on-line journalism it's advertisers who are paying the bill. Since this recession started my parking CPC advertising revenue is off by 30% and I've heard others mention similar percentages.

I've heard that during past recessions companies who maintained or increased their marketing spend do better than their competitors, and was planning on researching that for a blog entry when this little gem dropped into my mailbox giving me the leads I needed. I've checked out their quotes and found expanded versions and they seem genuine, at least as far as being on the web. I haven't traced anything back to the original source.

"In a study of U.S. recessions, McGraw-Hill Research analyzed 600 companies covering 16 different SIC industries from 1980 through 1985. The results showed that business-to-business firms that maintained or increased their advertising expenditures during the 1981-1982 recession averaged significantly higher sales growth, both during the recession and for the following three years, than those that eliminated or decreased advertising. By 1985, sales of companies that were aggressive recession advertisers had risen 256% over those that didn't keep up their advertising."

Have a look at their graph. It shows that the aggressively competitive companies had only a slight advantage over their competitors in the years leading up to the recession. Their sales growth was middling as the recession hit, but while competitors cut back in year one, or two, or both, they continued to invest in advertising and promotion.

All these firms continued to grow during the recession, but after it was over the difference really showed. Those who had cut back stayed at more or less the same slow level of growth while the aggressive advertisers left them behind at a much faster rate. "By the end of 1985 the companies that didn't cut back had grown a whopping 256%."

MarketSense compared 101 household name brands during the recessionary period 1989-1991. Jell-O, Crisco, Hellman's, Green Giant and Doritos saw sales drop by as much as 26-64%. Jiff peanut butter raised ad support and sales went up 57%; Kraft salad dressings saw a rise of 70%. In the beer category, overall spending was down 1% while Bud Light and Coors Light, each spending ahead of the category, saw sales increases of 15% and 16% respectfully. Pizza Hut sales rose 61% and Taco Bell's 40% thanks to strong advertising support, with McDonald's volume down approximately 28%". Investopedia

All Business Reports:

"During our last economic downturn, while aggressive marketers such as Proctor and Gamble took advantage of reduced media rates to expand their advertising program, K-Mart decided to decrease advertising during September and October, 2001.

The result? K-Mart sales dropped a resounding 5% during October. By late fall the company had lost far more in sales than it had saved in marketing expense.

At least a dozen other studies ranging from 1923 through 1991 show nearly identical results. Meldrum and Fewsmith showed in a series of six studies that, for all post World War II recessions, those firms that kept advertising aggressively increased profits as well as gross sales during the recession."

Compared to equivalent OECD nations, NZ business is badly under represented in terms of having web presence. My pick is that the NZ businesses that survive well will tend to be those who are aggressive in their advertising across multiple media, including investing in their web presence. We need to keep telling people why having quality web sites and advertising, including having generics, is good for their business. In any recession some people go to the wall while others thrive, mainly by improving their businesses to make them more efficient and profitable. If they perceive that they need to aggressively keep on with the Internet marketing and advertising to improve or maintain their sales then businesses like ours also have a chance to grow.

I've recently been asked "Do you think aftermarket sales will fall off due to the recession?" I think the answer is "maybe" and to a large extent it depends on people like us. To be honest, I briefly considered a fire-sale but decided I still believe in this business so I just increased the list price of my portfolio. I believe if we can hold steady, or better still go forwards during the downturn, we should be placed to reap the rewards.

What does concern me is the downturn in advertising revenue. My mini-sites are producing more, my two fully developed directories are holding steady, but my parking revenue is down by about a third! Part of it is that my traffic is down a bit, but more of it is because I'm making a smaller amount per landing. I think the reason is that less people are bidding for keywords, so there's both less ads to show and I get less for each click. It's hurting me in the wallet, hence my renewed interest in affiliate marketing and restarting and monetising some previously moribund sites, but it is survivable and when the recession is over I intend to be on the net making money.

Beware of free DNS services

Businesses come in all shapes and forms. Many small businesses are sole traders, often working on a shoestring budget. When businesses of this size first create a web presence it is often done on free services like Geocities or Blogspot. Sometimes this is because they are trying to minimize costs, and sometimes it is because they wandered into a web presence by accident. Although I am an IT professional, and have my own cheap hosting, this blog started as a very personal diary that I later split into three, distributing the back articles; one of the child blogs is decidedly business related. Once a blog or mini-site becomes part of a business' identity it really needs to be under the business' branding and this usually means having its own domain name to build recognition of the business, avoid confusion with the other sites on the free host, and present a more professional image.

When a domain name is registered it needs hosting. Sure, there's lots of cheap hosting out there, but while registrars will offer advertising supported free hosting or expensive paid hosting they seldom point their customers towards the cheap offers. There's a number of reasons for this, but as cheap hosting is often unreliable or offered by unstable companies the registrars can be forgiven for not wanting to damage their brand by recommending an unsuitable option. Most registrars do offer free mail and web redirection to your existing free hosts, so it is the easy option to redirect mail on the domain to your existing free web mail service (e.g. Google's Gmail) and redirect web page views to your already established free service. They do this by providing the Domain Name Server (DNS) for your domain on one of their servers. When a surfer or another computer wants to contact your site, the DNS gives the address of the machine where your site is, in this case they hand out the address of one of their own machines, they also supply a web server on that machine that receives the initial request and forwards the browser on to the free service and a mail server that receives incoming mail and sends it on to Gmail.

In order to make the service affordable to them, free web hosts have to limit and standardize the resources the offer and usually give away their free status, through having adverts as Geocities does, an obvious format as Blogspot does, the URL you use for your pages or they just aren't flexible enough for your site's needs as it grows.

The next step is to buy some cheap hosting and change your site over use the DNS supplied by the hosting company. Here's where things suddenly go wrong for you. The DNS system works because the address information is cached in servers all around the net. When you change the master DNS for a domain, it doesn't immediately change, the first delay is that it takes time for the master DNS to load the new DNS address for your domain, then there is a much bigger delay before all the caches that are holding your old address flush that information and need to refresh the information about your domain.

For two or three years your registrar has been quietly forwarding your email and sending people to your free website for as long, so it seems reasonable to expect it will keep forwarding for the few days the change-over takes, but the reality is different and the moment you change your DNS to a different provider, they shut off this service. The cut-off is immediate and doesn't even wait for the master server to load your new DNS. There's no technical reason for this, it's just the way that every registrar I've ever worked with handles the process.

The effect of this is severe, your website will suddenly go dead and any email for your domain will bounce back to the sender, making your site seem to have simply gone away. Usually this will last for anything up to 72 hours (or more), with some people being able to access you through the new DNS sooner. In a final touch of irony, the more popular your domain is, the greater the chance that its addresses will be cached. If Murphy's awake and the missing email is an important business email you may well lose whatever business this mail involves and at the minimum you will appear less professional in the eyes of affected customers.

The easiest way you can avoid this problem is to move your site off your registrar's DNS long before your site becomes popular. If it is too late for that, try and schedule the change for a long weekend. You can also check out their control panel to see if you can change the DNS to point MX (Mail) and A (Address) records at your new server. You'll still get some down-time, but not as long. One thing you can do to try and further reduce the negative effects is to co-ordinate your change with the master DNS' reload cycle.

Every top level domain name (.net, .uk, .nz) has its own cycle for loading changes to the DNS for domains. Some do it continuously as domains change so you can't synchronize, others do it at fixed times of day. The .nz master DNS is reloaded every hour on the hour (nominal - it actually takes a few minutes to process), so if you change your DNS at five past the hour, your registrar will suspend its services at 5 past the hour and your domain will be completely dead for the following hour, on the other hand if you change the DNS at 5 to the hour, you will only be completely dead for 10 minutes.

I have previously published a shorter version of this posting on Qassia.