After 5 years with Racknine (some good, some not so good), I’ve decided to move my web hosting to Blurstorm. They rank completely off the charts at Web Hosting Jury, a “web hosting reviews site with a difference. All the hosting reviews on our site are reviews submitted by past or present customers of that particular web host.” Wish me luck!
How to Snatch an Expiring Domain
Mike Davidson, an art director from Seattle, has a well written, comprehensive and informative article on “How to Snatch an Expiring Domain“. He offers details on how a domain expires, compares the services of three firms that automate the “snatching” (Snapnames.com, Enom.com, and Pool.com) and shares some lessons learned. For anyone that has been coveting a seemingly abandoned domain name, this is a must read.
Why you should own your own Domain Name and how you can get one
It really burns me up when I see an Ad for a business (any business), and they include an @aol.com email address (or some other “generic” email provider). It is really quite simple (and inexpensive) to own your own domain name (and all the email addresses that go with it). This way, you own it forever (assuming that you pay your bills), and control your own email destiny. Now I realize that it’s no longer 1996, and you may think that all the good names, like goosedroppings.com 
, are already taken. But a little creativity and a few helpful websites can help you come up with a good domain name that you might even be able to pass on to your children.
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In trying to get this site up and running on WordPress, I felt that I needed to add some additional plugins, above and beyond what was provided with my base install. (The reason I thought that I needed this, was because I found “comment spam” 15 minutes after I opened the site. As it turns out, it was my friend Rob’s attempt at humor!). Well, my webhost provider, Racknine, among other things, provides me with shell access to my account. However, recently they locked down a few of the tools that had been freely available, such as wget and curl, using jailshell. This “feature” was added by racknine to help combat hackers (of the “Black Hat” kind). My problem? I need to download files (potentially large), and now I can’t suck them down directly.
The solution I found?
Use “Storage on Demand“, a free service that gives a user up to 700 meg of temporary storage (up to 10 days), with a simple and easy web interface. One piece of advice… remember that the service uses port 2121, and not the default (21).