The winners for our No-IP 11,000 Facebook Likes giveaway are the following:

Barry Allen
Jose Mora
Clayton Holloway
Nick Eklund
Brad

Congrats! Please email ngoguen-giveaway(at)no-ip(dot)com to claim your prize…

Today I was in the post office mailing out some No-IP t-shirts from our past giveaway, when a college age girl came running in frantically. She rushed to the next available clerk and started explaining her issue. She had sent a package to Nigeria yesterday, and she had just found out it was a complete scam. The postal clerk said there was nothing that could be done.

The girls face dropped as she quietly thanked the clerk and walked slowly out of the post office surely ready to burst into tears at any moment…

I was filling out a customs form in the corner when this scenario was playing out and I couldn’t help but chuckle when I heard the girls plea. I thought in my head, “do people really still get scammed by craiglist scammers?”

Apparently, Yes.

What can you do to safeguard yourself against scammers?

1. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Typically, these scams start by the scammer replying to an item for sale or a job posting on Craigslist or another online posting site. The scammers often say that they are overseas or want the item fast and will send payment immediately. This is scam. The payment would have been a fake check for more than the price of the item. Upon deposit into your account, the scammer will request for you to send the extra money back to them via Western Union. After a few days, your bank will call you to let you know that the check was fake and the funds/fees are now your problem.

2. Be mindful of the sender of the email. If the address seems funny, or if the email is sent to more than just you, it is probably a scam.

3. Scammers often use stories that will pull at your heartstrings. “I lost my wife and three children and am now in Nigeria on missionary work feeding the poor, so please send the money here.” NO!

4. If a Nigerian Prince emails you and says he needs your help depositing money, please stop reading. You will not be handsomely rewarded, you will be scammed and feel really dumb. The same goes for someone that says they need your assistance claiming an unclaimed lottery ticket.

Microsoft recently did a study “Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are from Nigeria?” It is very interesting. Obviously, I am not the target audience of these emails and the scammers probably know that. 9 out of 10 people probably aren’t the audience, but that one person, (probably a grandparent, parent, or really gullible college student that refuses to listen to their much wiser parents) is their audience and it seems like they are still winning the battle.

Please don’t end up poor, scammed and feeling really dumb. Let me reiterate, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Do you know anyone that has been a victim of an online scam? Leave your thoughts and comments below!

Did you know that No-IP was an idea that was started in college by our founders? That small idea has grown into a great big idea with over 13.5 million users worldwide. We are proud to say that since 1999, we have been providing rock solid Dynamic DNS and Managed DNS , no ifs, ands, or buts.

Answer the following question for a chance to win a No-IP T-shirt or a Year of Enhanced DNS. 5 people will win. Winners will be announced on Tuesday, August 21, 2012. Leave your answer in the comments and be sure to Like this post and share it with your friends on Facebook and Twitter!

What No-IP service allows you to use your own domain name on our redundant and reliable managed DNS network?

We have all heard the horror stories. Websites go down all the time, it’s not a question of if, it’s when. A 2009 Dunn & Bradstreet survey reported that 49 percent of Fortune 500 companies experience at least 1.6 hours of unplanned downtime per week. That is over 80 hours of downtime a year, not including website maintenance downtime. How would these outages affect your business and brand reputation? Do you know how much it will cost you when your website goes down?

What would cause an outage of your website though? Downtime can be caused by internal and external issues. Natural events as simple as a lightning storm, or as extreme as hurricanes and earthquakes can easily take your website down, as well as man-made events like changes to network configurations, hardware or even wiring issues. Outages can cause both short term and long term problems that not only affect lost revenue, labour costs and marketing costs, but also indirect things like lost customers, lost business opportunities, driving traffic to your competitors and irreversible brand damage.

We have all heard about the recent Amazon outage that affected major brands like Instagram, Netflix, Pinterest, and others. Not only was this an Amazon issue, but because of the other companies that were directly involved, it became those companies issue as well. Many customers could be found on Twitter complaining about the outages of Netflix to them directly, even though the issue wasn’t even caused by Netflix. If your customers aren’t happy, your brand isn’t happy.

So, how much does all of this downtime cost a company? It is all dependent on how much revenue and sales your company generates from your website. If you are generating $10,000 a day from your website and your website is down for a few hours, this could greatly affect your bottom line. It could be the same scenerio if you generate sales leads via your website. If customers search for your website and it is down, the first thing they are going to do is go to a search engine and find another provider.

Downtime can potentially cost your business tens of thousands of dollars a year. Why take the risk? If your website is important to you, you should really think about a Managed DNS solution. DNS is an essential part of the Internet.  If your website is hosted on web servers that are only located in one or two locations, and something happens, your entire website can be taken down. DNS that is hosted in many geographically diverse locations means that even if the unthinkable happens, your customers will still be able to reach your site.

The location of DNS servers is important in ensuring 100% uptime. No-IP deploys nameservers across the globe at geographically unique datacenters using different tier 1 bandwidth providers to ensure a natural disaster or connectivity outage does not disrupt our robust DNS network.

Remember, there are no upsides to downtime.

Have you or your business ever been affected by a DNS outage? Share your thoughts below!

Q: How many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: None. It’s a hardware problem.