Blue Chi’s

I’ve been renting a dedicated server at 1and1 for a little bit less than a year, and through this period, I only had two bad incidents in the past, but none of them was enough for me to switch providers, however, two days ago I got an email from 1and1 saying that they received a spam complaint, less than ten minutes after the first email, I received a second one saying that they are receiving a *massive* number of complaints and for that reason they are locking up my account until I email them back with the measures I took to stop the spam.

Both of these emails were automated messages, nothing in them had any details about the complaint, I instantly called them, waited for 15 minutse on the custom support line until someone talked to me, and I was told that the ‘abuse department’ can only be reached by email, the technical support dept cannot do anything for me, and all I have to do is wait. I emailed the abuse dept back and I got no response for a whole day, I called again, and they told me to just wait cause they can’t do anything, I emailed the complaints dept telling them about the mess (again, the complaints dept can only be reached by email, no phone line), my email to the complaint department was sent 24 hours ago and I haven’t received anything from them yet. Today at around 3pm UK time my account was unlocked, I got no explanation email from the abuse dept or the complaints dept.  I didn’t even get a notification saying that my account is not unlocked.

I do not send any emails using the 1and1 servers, and I use a 3rd party service to send my website’s monthly newsletter. The alleged complaint does not make sense.

I was frustrated for more than 24 hours with no response for 1and1, our members were frustrated, and the contractual obligations with our advertisers were at risk, I was obviously losing traffic and money. 1and1 had not justifications for shutting me down, and they did not even bother to even email me back with an exaplanation.

Unfortunately, the losses we sustained do not justify taking legal action, but these people lost my trust and respect. I have already purchased a hosting package at Media Temple and will be moving all my websites to the new service ASAP.

If you are thinking of getting a host for your website make sure you stay away from 1and1.

I started a new blog recently that focuses on IT Law and it’s called myITLawyer. The subject of this blog is not mainstream (IT Law) and I am actually still not sure about the level of detail which I should go for, I will be posting on weekly basis about the topics I go through during my course , these will be international in nature (I am studying European, American, and Japanese IP), but I will also be posting about Omani IT law as well.

If anybody has any comments or suggestions please feel free to comment!

(PS. Check out my new article at the Times of Oman).

This is a reminder for all of those interested in .OM domain names, the deadline for submitting feedback to the TRA’s public consutlation paper on .OM domain name framework is November 8th (Next Saturday). So if you have any opinion on how domain names in Oman are regulated then please take a moment to read this and send your feedback.

You can download the proposed framework from here (Warning PDF link).

Just read about this on TechCrunch, Google has announced an upgrade to Google Analytics, the free online service for tracking your website traffic. 

The new updates include AdSense tracking, API, custom reports, and motion graphs – and those are the most awesome thing I’ve seen in a long time. I can’t wait to use these motion graphs. Check out the video below to learn what it’s all about.

Read more about this on TechCrunch.

As some of you might remember, I moved my blog to WordPress exactly one month ago. It was previously hosted by blogger on blogspot.com. When I moved the blog to my own server on WordPress all my link were broken as all the posts had new URLs. So it was normal for my traffic to drop because all the inks to specific posts no longer worked and because the pagerank for all the pages restarted to zero I lost the majority of search engine driven traffic. The daily traffic to my blog is now less than half what it used to be when I was on blogspot.

This is usually not a big deal because Google will eventually index the blog all over again and people will be able to find it on Google, but for some reason, when searching for stuff I wrote before I moved the blog Google still shows up blogspot.com links and does not seem to recognize that the content can also be found on this blog. Google usually punishes those who publish ‘duplicate content’ as they are usually spam websites and does not show them on search results.

I’m surely that if I was in fact penalized, it must’ve been because of blogspot’s horrible caching. My new content shows up, but my old does not.

The solution to this sort of problem is to generate links to the old content, so that (1) Google knows they exist, and (2) the pagerank of these pages increase and they will have higher chances of showing up high on the search results.

It is pretty hard to get other people to link to your old content, so the easiest way for you to do this is to link to your content yourself. There is a higher opportunity to get higher ranking by receiving external links, but internal links actually also count, and they can have a significant impact if your website already has a high pagerank.