As Hurricane Sandy (Frankenstorm) barrels towards the East Coast threatening tens of millions of people, promising to be the “storm of the century”, a lot of our users are wondering, what will happen to my domain? Will it be okay? Will it suffer any downtime?

Yes and NO. Although No-IP does have points of presence in Ashburn, Virginia and New Jersey, our robust network will not be affected by power outages or flooding caused by Hurricane Sandy because our network is globally redundant. All data that is hosted at these two locations is also hosted at our 9 other locations across the globe and since our network is backed by our Anycast DNS, if one of these data centers were to go down, the traffic will just be routed to the next nearest location.

Please remember  DNS is an essential part of the Internet.  If your web servers are only hosted in one location, and something happens, your entire website can be wiped out. Having DNS that is hosted in many geographically diverse locations, like ours, 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. We deploy name servers across the globe at geographically unique data centers using different tier 1 bandwidth providers to ensure a natural disaster or connectivity outage does not disrupt our robust DNS network. Check out No-IP Plus Managed DNS for more information.

To all of our friends and families on the east coast, we hope you find a safe place to ride out the storm with your loved ones.

Creating  a Free Dynamic DNS account is easy!

We are happy to announce that we recently added the Google Translate Widget to the footer of our website! You will now be able to conveniently browse the No-IP website in 64 languages. We will also be adding additional languages to our Support Section soon. We hope this new feature makes our website a little easier to navigate. To choose your language, simply scroll to the footer of our website and click the Google Translate dropdown in the lower left corner, choose your language and voila!

Do you enjoy this new feature? How did you translate our website before? 

Scammers. What would we do without them? We have talked about the Domain Registry of America Scam before, but we recently got a letter in the mail from one of them and wanted to share it with you so you don’t get scammed too. As you can see, they are trying to claim that if the domain is not renewed through them, it will be lost. They are also charging $35 a year, $20+ more than the industry average for a year of a .com domain name. What the letter doesn’t say is that it is a total scam. (Click here to view a larger image of the letter)

How did they get my contact information?
When you register a domain, you need to provide the registrar with a valid name, mailing address and email address to provide to the WHOIS database, without this information you cannot register the domain. Shady domain registries troll the WHOIS records for domains that are soon to be expired and send a letter or email to the owner of the domain. It usually says something along the lines of “your domain is expiring soon, you must renew it before you lose it” What they don’t mention is that your domain is not currently registered with them and the transaction would actually be a domain transfer, not a renewal and at a price that is most likely 3 times as much!

You can avoid this entire scenario by purchasing or adding Private Registration to your domain name. Private Registration removes your contact information and inserts ours. We filter out all of the bad emails and snail mail and only forward the important stuff.

Receive free Private Registration when you add it to a domain or register a new domain! Expires 10.31.12. Coupon Code:  PRIVATE

*not valid on renewals or with any other offers, management reserves all rights.

Have you or a friend ever received one of these letters or email scams?