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Why DreamHost is holding off on WordPress 5.0 updates

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Hosting company will delay auto-updates until after Christmas as a precaution.

Earlier this week I wrote about how GoDaddy auto-updated its managed WordPress customers to WordPress 5.0 shortly after it came out and why I thought this was a bad idea. This week I also interviewed Mika Epstein, a WordPress engineer at DreamHost, for an upcoming podcast and asked her how DreamHost was handling the update.

“In this case, because 5.0 was such a major update, we actually haven’t begun running our auto updates yet for customers,” Epstein said.

DreamHost usually pushes out updates quickly but made an exception for WordPress 5.0.

“If it’s a security update, we’re absolutely going to push it out immediately and run upgrades on everyone, but in this case, because it’s the change that involves the new WordPress blog editor, formerly known as Gutenberg, and because it is such a dramatic change to so many things, we opted to wait until after the holiday season.”

While most sites can handle the 5.0 update without a problem, the company didn’t want to risk an update that breaks a site (especially an ecommerce site) during this busy time of the year.

“It’s really a gamble,” Epstein said. “I’d love to say that the majority of sites are going to be fine with 5.0 and this is true. That said, the people that are going to break are our high profile customers, are our customers who have e-commerce stores who maybe haven’t been keeping up with all their plugins and their theme updates like they should.”

DreamHost will notify all customers about the update and give them a chance to opt-out before pushing out automatic updates.

Epstein noted that each hosting service will make an auto-update decision based on its user base.

 

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.Law verification process to be simplified

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Change will make it easier for registrars to onboard top level domain.

The process for registering .law and .abogado (Spanish for attorney) domain names is about to get easier.

Registrants will still need to be a lawyer, law firm, court, law school or local regulator, but this information will be checked through standard Whois field rather than additional registration fields. This will make it easier for domain registrars to offer the domains without additional integration and development work.

.Law registry MMX provided these details to DNW:

MMX’s verification method has been simplified for both registrants and registrars allowing for standard Whois data fields to be used in verifying eligibility.  More specifically, the changes eliminate specific data fields required for registering a .law domain which also reduces any related development work for registrars to onboard .law.

.law’s purpose remains consistent in promoting trust within the legal profession by allowing qualified lawyers, law firms, courts of law, law schools and legal regulators to register a name.  MMX will continue to verify registrants to ensure adherence to its eligibility policy and protect the integrity of .law domain names.

The use of standard Whois data fields is effective on January 7th, 2019.

We are now working with several registrars to onboard .law and expect to see registration growth in 2019.

If you want additional information on .law eligibility requirements you can go to http://nic.law/eligibilitycriteria/

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10 end user domain sales up to $450,000

by — Domain Sales 0 Comments

Floral delivery company 1-800-Flowers.com purchased plants.com for $450K, topping several end user sales this week.

I’ve already written about this week’s top end user domain sale, Plants.com. Sedo broker Dave Evanson sold this domain to 1-800-Flowers.com on behalf of a Lousiana tropical plant nursery. You can read an interview with the seller here.

Here’s a look at this and other end user domain sales this week, including a .store domain for five figures. (You can view previous lists like this here.)

Plants.com $450,000- Sold to 1-800-Flowers.com potentially to redirect those who are searching for plant-specific gifts and products.

Dental.Store $11,785- BlueSafety.com specializes in water filtration for medical facilities. It is forwarding the domain to its BlueSafety.com website.

Rentberry.ca $8,888- Home rental company Rentberry now owns the Canadian ccTLD for its business, which operates at Rentberry.com.

HartMedical.com $3,500- Hart Medical Equipment is forwarding this domain to HartMedical.org. The company sells respiratory equipment, patient room equipment, bathroom and safety aids, wheelchairs and more.

Rewards.us $3,499- Purchased by Fluent, Inc., a digital marketing agency, so this may be for a campaign they’re working on for a client.

Bergamotte.fr €3,000- Plants.com wasn’t the only floral/plant-related purchase. This domain name was purchased by French floral delivery service Bergamotte, which is forwarding it to its .com domain.

Champion.hk $3,000- This Hong Kong ccTLD was bought by a solar power company called Champion Holdings Limited that sells and installs solar panels in China.

Brattle.us €2,750- This domain was purchased by the Brattle Group, which forwards it to Brattle.com. It provides consulting and expert testimony in economics, finance, and regulation to corporations, law firms, and public agencies.

4FT.com $2,300- A much better and succinct domain for this Spanish auto trader and appraisal service for classic cars that currently uses Fichatecnicareducida.online. It forwards to the longer domain.

Lifehealth.org $2,200- A nice .org domain for this healthcare service provider that is about launch.

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Marriott’s poor choice of domain for email notification

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Company chose to send breach notice from email-marriott.com, not marriott.com, leading to poor deliverability.

A couple of weeks ago hotel giant Marriott announced a data breach that involves personal data of up to 500 million guests. This type of data breach seems par for the course these days. It’s interesting to see how companies follow up after these breaches; the response can often shed light on overall poor practices that make it clear that a breach was inevitable.

Consider the Equifax breach in which the company’s own social media account tweeted out a link to the wrong domain name with information about the incident.

After the news about Marriott broke, I waited to get an email from Marriott that would notify me of what happened and how to protect myself. It never came…until I checked my spam folder. Gmail had marked two emails from Marriott about the breach as spam.

As Spamhaus notes, this is likely because Marriott sent the emails from email-marriott.com, not marriott.com. email-marriott.com doesn’t have the same domain reputation as marriott.com so email providers don’t give it the same trust level.

Domain name reputation is important when it comes to email deliverability. A domain that’s not well-known and suddenly sends hundreds of millions of emails is suspicious.

Email-marriott.com is also suspicious to humans; many phishing domains have a format similar to this. Add to this the propensity of people to misspell Marriott (is it two r’s or two t’s — oh, it’s both) and you have a mess on your hands. Thankfully, some security experts registered the typos.

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Files.com sells for $750,000, $25k more than in 2009

by — Domain Sales 11 Comments

Files.com sold about a decade ago for about the same amount of money.

Name Ninja Bill Sweetman and Sedo have helped broker the sale of Files.com for $750,000.

While that’s a nice price for the domain, it doesn’t appear to be a windfall for the seller. Files.com last traded hands publicly in late 2009 or early 2010. It sold on Sedo for $725,000.

The Whois records have been private since then. Assuming it was the same owner, they didn’t make out well on this domain even if $750,000 was net of transaction fees.

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