July 2008 Archives

There was an Earthquake this morning in Los Angeles. If you are interested in the full details check out the USGS site here:

Magnitude 5.4 - GREATER LOS ANGELES AREA, CALIFORNIA

Reports are sizing the quake in the mid 5’s - which means if you are in LA you felt it. I must say it was in interesting experience looking out the window in my 28th floor office watching the world move.

As an unfortunate side effect the elevators serving the high rise (the upper floors) of the building are still out. This means each time I need to go to our main POP on the 7th floor I end up climbing 10 flights of stairs on the way down, and again on back on the way up.

So I just found out that a utility I wrote called mrtgsql (parses and records the values of the mrtg .log files into a SQL database is/was being used by a German hosting operation. Honestly I wouldn’t have imagined that anyone would be using the software - very cool that it came to use by someone. I’ve long since re-written the utility to read directly from .rrd files. Maybe I should release that work as well.

http://www.cthought.com/free_software/

From Data Center Knowledge:

Go Daddy said this week that it is now managing more than 30 million domains

I was actually thinking about the domain registration business the other day and what the actually costs associated are. GoDaddy is charging $6.85/year (plus the $0.20 ICANN fee) for a .com domain registration. If they are paying Verisign the list price of $6.42/year per .com name registered GoDaddy is making $0.43/year per domain (a 6.7% margin).

With 30 million registered domains that is 12.9 million/year in Gross after $192.6 million/year payment to Verisign. Who’s the real winner here?

To bad there are those pesky things called merchant fees. At a best case 1-2% of the sale price for Visa/Mastercard (higher for Amex) that margin goes away really fast. Ever wonder why the GoDaddy shopping cart is so cluttered with all those up sells?