It’s hard to believe it is already 2020. It seems like just yesterday that the world was in a panic about Y2K. So what are the things you should do to prepare your website for the new year? The best way to start the decade is to focus on some basic domain and website maintenance. What should you do to get your website updated? Find out below.

1. Update Your Copyright Date

If the bottom of our website still says 2019 for the copyright year, you will need to update it to match the current year. To update it easily and have it automatically update every year, use the following Javascript in your footer:

<script type="text/javascript">
  document.write(new Date().getFullYear());
</script>

2. Check Your Domain Expiration

Do you know when your domain expires? If not, you should log in to your account and check the expiration date. If it is set to expire soon, renew it for another year. While you are there, add a credit card or payment option so you never have to worry about it expiring. Setting up a payment option will opt your account into auto-renew. This will not only save you time but could also save you a lot of money because letting your domain expire can be a very costly mistake. While you are there update any out of date contact information, including your physical and email addresses. Keeping all of that information is imperative to the safety of your domain, as well as that of your business.

3. Review Your Website

Make sure all your website information is current. Are all your newest product offerings on your website? Does all the copy reflect the most up to date information for your business? Often times websites get built, copy gets written and then nothing else happens. Sure, you may add a new product offering to your shopping cart, or change the logo, but is everything else right? Does your about page say you have been in business for 10 years, even though it has been 15? Giving your website a quick yearly once-over will help prevent small copy errors from slipping through the cracks.

4. Analyze Your Web Traffic

This should be something you are doing weekly, if not daily. But if you aren’t, get an analytics tool like Google Analytics and check things out. You can compare traffic from month to month/year to year and brainstorm ways to try to increase traffic for the new year. Are you running CPC campaigns? Check your ad copy and keywords to be sure that they are still relevant and that you are still targeting the right customers and sending them to the right webpages on your site. Consider creating a new campaign and a few new ads to keep your content current and fresh. This may be the most important maintenance you do this year, as analytics has the ability to show you when a problem occurs so that you can work to fix it. Always make sure this is updated and that all your tracking tools are working properly.

Following this simple maintenance checklist will guarantee you are ready to take on the new decade. Cheers!

For the sixth year in a row, No-IP is hosting their Giving Thanks Food Drive to benefit the local community. The Giving Thanks Food Drive will benefit the Food Bank of Northern Nevada, a local non-profit organization that is dedicated to helping feed more than 91,000 neighbors in need in our community.

Having access to healthy food is essential for our community, many of who face hunger, therefore, we ask that those donating food choose the most nutritious items available whenever possible. Items needed for donation include the following:

• Canned Meals: Stews, Soups, Spaghetti/Ravioli (Low-Sodium Preferred)
• Protein: Peanut Butter, Tuna, Salmon, Chicken, Dried or Canned Beans
• Grains: Whole Grain Cereal, Oatmeal, Brown Rice, Whole Grain Pasta
• Fruits: Canned (Packed in 100% Juice or Light Syrup), Dried Fruit, Applesauce (No Sugar Added), 100% Fruit Juice Boxes
• Vegetables: Canned (No Salt Added and/or Low-Sodium Preferred)
• Dairy: Shelf Stable Milk
• Kid-friendly Snacks: Granola Bars, Popcorn, Animal Crackers, Graham Crackers
• Baby Products: Formula, Infant Cereal, Baby Food

Please ensure items are non-perishable and NOT expired. We believe in giving back to the local community that we all love so much. The holiday season means many different things to people, but it should never be met with food scarcity. “Each year, our team is so happy to be able to give back to our community,” stated Natalie Goguen, Marketing Manager. “I am so thankful to work for a company that believes so much in giving back to the local community,” said Goguen.

Want to help? To donate to the Giving Thanks Food Drive, please bring donations to the No-IP office at 425 Maestro Dr. Second Floor, Reno, NV 89511, Monday through Friday from 8:30 am to 5 pm. Donations will be accepted from Tuesday, November 13 through Tuesday, December 12. Food items should be nonperishable. Please ensure that items are not expired.

ABOUT NO-IP:

Since its founding, No-IP has grown to more than 25 million customers and is the preferred choice for dynamic DNS. No-IP provides powerful, useful, and reliable services to home users, small businesses and members of the Fortune 500. From Dynamic DNS to Managed DNS and other integral domain products, No-IP delivers trusted products that help people stay connected to their devices and ensures that the domain and related services are fast, safe and always available.

What is IPv6?

IPv6 is an Internet addressing system that is designed to replace IPv4. It works in a very similar way as IPv4 but offers some additional benefits.  As the pool of available IPv4 addresses diminishes, there was a need to implement a protocol that offers a much larger pool of IP addresses to accommodate the ever-growing demand in the IP space.  We continue to see an increase in the number of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that are providing IPv6 connectivity. This means that you may already be using IPv6 and don’t even know it. Under the IPv6 protocol, domain names like noip.com are changed into IP addresses via DNS as usual, but instead of the IPv4 DNS record type A, IPv6 uses record type AAAA, often referred to as “Quad-A.”  Because the adoption of IPv6 has been slow, many domains have both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. An example for google.com can be found below:

• IPv4 address for google.com is 127.217.11.174
• IPv6 address for google.com is 2607:f8b0:4007:80d:0000:200e

Most operating systems are dual-stacked, meaning that they support both IPv4 and IPv6 simultaneously and the system will choose which address to access.

What’s New with our Protocol?

The changes we have made to our dynamic DNS compatibility protocol allow for both A  and AAAA hostnames to be updated individually or dual-stacked.  We have also added functionality to send IPv6 updates through IPv4 systems.  By doing this, we have given developers the flexibility to offer Dynamic DNS services through their devices and software in whatever format best meets their use case. Please check out our updated integration page or contact our integration specialists to find out more about our Dynamic DNS API and how it now supports IPv6. Get started now by offering your customers DDNS with full support for A and AAAA records using our dynamic DNS API!

Need IP Detection?

If you are looking to use our dynamic DNS compatibility protocol on devices not connected directly to the internet (i.e., devices behind NAT), the router may be assigning IP addresses locally.  These DHCP events may occur without the router external IP address actually changing. In this case, we have provided an IP detection service that can be implemented to check for IP address changes on these devices to keep them connected to a hostname. To find out more, please visit our IP Detection Service page.

First things first, let’s give a little refresher of what DNS is. DNS stands for Domain Name System

DNS is like the white page directory for the Internet. You supply a name, DNS supplies a number. The name, in this case, is specifically a hostname and the number is an IP address. Without DNS you would have to remember every IP address of every website you want to visit.

IP stands for Internet Protocol. An IP address is a unique number that allows computers to locate each other on a network. The Internet is a big network and uses IP addresses to route the communication to the proper host. An IP address looks like this: 204.16.252.112.

So how does it work? What happens when you type a URL into a web browser?

1. Enter Desired Domain (or website)

Alice wants to visit the website www.noip.com, so she types it in the address bar in her favorite web browser.

2. Computer Looks Up the IP Address

Her computer contacts her ISP to get the IP address for noip.com. Her ISP’s DNS server doesn’t know the IP address, so it checks with the domain root servers.

3. Website Loads

The root servers tell Alice’s ISP the IP address of No-IP’s nameservers and her ISP looks up noip.com. Her computer receives the IP address and connects to the website.

What is different about DoH and How does it work?

DoH stands for DNS over HTTPS.  The DoH protocol works much the same way as DNS in that a DNS query is sent to a DNS server to retrieve a website. However, DoH sends query information encrypted in HTTPS rather than plain text (as is the case with DNS). This protocol also works at the app level instead of the operating system level.  This allows DoH queries to be sent to a specific list of DNS servers and bypass ISP-level DNS default settings.

Google notes that “the idea is to bring the key security and privacy benefits of HTTPS to DNS, which is how your browser is able to determine which server is hosting a given website.”

What are the Pros and Cons of DoH?

Pros

• It prevents man-in-the-middle attacks – since DNS queries are traditionally sent in plain-text, DoH can reduce the risk of man in the middle attacks where someone can see what DNS queries you are running between you and your recursive server because it encrypts your queries.
• The encryption with DoH can protect sensitive information that DNS hijacking methodologies employ and obfuscate data that could be sniffed by third-party observers and ISPs.
• Because DoH centralizes DNS traffic to a few DoH enable servers, load time performance is typically improved.

Cons

• It overrides any sort of DNS filtering your network is doing to provide insight into security and your network info
• It provides a different experience from web browsing and to the rest of your computer and network. You might have some DNS packets going to one recursive server and then some going through your network settings, so you may have a different experience from browser to the rest of your network.
• It weakens cyber-security. By encrypting DNS queries, companies using DNS monitoring for cybersecurity measures will lose visibility into data such as query type, response and originating IP that are used to determine bad actors.

Where is DoH being used currently?

Currently, the only major browsers that are offering support for DoH are Chrome 78 or higher and Mozilla Firefox. Safari may offer DoH support in the future, but this has not been announced yet.

How does this affect No-IP services?

Long story short…this does not affect No-IP services. It actually shouldn’t really affect your Internet browsing either. If DoH does fail for any reason, your browser will just fall back to the traditional DNS lookups.

Have questions or concerns about DoH? Leave your comments below.