Swedish hosting provider Binero has announced that it has DNSSEC-signed all of its customers’ .se domains. This brings the total amount of signed .se domains to more than 100,000 from the previous total of 5,000.

“Nearly one in ten Swedish domains are now validated against attacks with manipulated dns-information, like phishing,” Binero’s press release said.

It’s hard to find any worldwide numbers to compare to but ICANN reported yesterday that 88 TLDs (Top-Level Domains) are DNSSEC signed.

But what is DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) and why should you care whether your domains are signed with it or not?

Read more

Remember domain tasting? At its worst, millions of domain names were yanked up and dropped every day in this rather nasty scheme that abused the five-day “add grace period” for domain registrations. Things were bad, really bad. Back in 2006-2007, a full 94% of domain registrations were the result of domain tasting, only 6% were legitimate, permanent registrations.

Domain tasting was largely killed off by some policy changes from ICANN in 2008 (with a final death blow early in 2009), so we thought it was interesting to see this historical chart of .com domain names that actually showed visual evidence of the practice, and when it disappeared.

Read more

The open source movement is a popular one, and it’s certainly made its mark on the software landscape. But where has it made its biggest mark? What is the most successful open source endeavor of all time?

Actually, when you see it as a whole, isn’t the Web the biggest open source success of them all?

Perhaps the most famous example is the LAMP stack that lies behind so many websites, i.e. Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. But there’s so much more when you think about it.

Here are some of the open source projects that make the Web tick.

Read more

Running an uptime monitoring service as we do, over time it’s become obvious to us that a large portion of website problems are caused by DNS issues, and in many cases those issues were a direct result of bad DNS settings. In other words, there is a lot of downtime and other website errors that could have been avoided if the DNS servers of that website had been correctly configured from the start.

Read more

DNS, the Domain Name System, is a vital part of the Internet. And since it’s such a vital part of the Internet, it’s important that websites have correct DNS settings. If they don’t, it can lead to a number of problems, one of them being downtime. On top of that, bad DNS settings can be hard to track down and can cause a lot of head ache for webmasters and site owners.

We here at Pingdom run a website monitoring service that tracks the uptime of tens of thousands of websites for our users, so we deal with site issues on a daily basis. Over time, it has become exceedingly clear that a large portion of the various errors we detect are caused by bad DNS settings or poorly configured DNS servers.

This is why we now are introducing an addition to our free webmaster tools: a DNS health test.

Read more

We stumbled upon an interesting statistic the other day: According to DomainTools there are more than 380 million deleted gTLD domain names, i.e. domain names that at some point have been registered but no longer exist. More than 80% of those are .com domain names.

This number needs to be put into perspective to understand how unnaturally large it is. The total number of active gTLD domain names (.com, .net, .org, etc.) today is about 118 million. We find it hard to believe that on top of these, there would have at some time existed another 380 million legitimate domain names.

So how did that number become so large? The answer is quite simple: domain tasting.

Read more

Most country code top-level domains on the Internet represent areas with millions of people, such as .uk (United Kingdom), .ca (Canada), .de (Germany), .se (Sweden), and so on, but there a places where the population isn’t counted in the millions, or even thousands, that still have their very own top-level domain on the Internet. Some of them aren’t even inhabited.

Read more

DNS, the Domain Name System, is one of the major pillars of the Internet. It’s a critical service, and without it we would all have to use IP addresses instead of handy domain names like “Pingdom.com” when we want to visit websites, send emails, and so on.

However, DNS has a huge flaw. Because DNS lacks security features it has been relatively easy for hackers to trick DNS servers with false information. By tricking DNS servers, hackers have been able to hijack entire websites. Needless to say, attacks such as these are a security nightmare and can be used for a large variety of malicious purposes such as site defacement, phishing, malware installations, and more.

Read more

Last night, a routine maintenance of Sweden’s top-level domain .se went seriously wrong, introducing an error that made DNS lookups for all .se domain names start failing. The entire Swedish Internet effectively stopped working at this point. Swedish (.se) websites could not be reached, email to Swedish domain names stopped working, and for many these problems persist still.

Read more

With the Internet growing rapidly over the years, the number of generic top-level domains (gTLDs) has increased from just a handful to about twenty, with many more proposed or in planning. Some, such as .com and .edu, have seen widespread adoption and are a useful contribution to the Internet. Others haven’t been quite as lucky. You could say they have flopped.

From domain extensions that never made it past the planning table, to those that make little sense at all, there are probably more flops than successes. Here are five of the worst TLD flops in Internet history (in no specific order).

Read more