A year and a half ago, I made the stupid mistake of trying out a cut-rate domain registar/hosting provider: Host Department. For the low price of something like $80, I got my domain registered plus hosting, and it was far less expensive than the host I've been with for years. What did I learn? You get what you pay for.

After a couple of unexplained outages and a slower-than-molasses-in-January server, I decided my experiment had failed, and that's when the fun began. First, I wanted to simply continue with my domains registered there, but hosted at my regular host. Oops; they cancelled my whole account, and I lost my business domain (fourlittlebees.com). It was being held for $30, during which time I could pay $200 to get it back. Who's squatting on it and has been since the second they "deleted" my account? ENOM.

Once I saw that mess, I started the process to transfer my remaining three domains out of there. Six months later, I got one domain, but the .com domain? The one I've PAID to transfer TWICE because Host Department has failed to release it each time? Now squatted on. By ENOM.

At what point is ICANN going to grow a pair and force registrars to abide by the terms they agree to as registrars? If I look on the control panel for my "new" registrar, you can see the transfer, still active. Still waiting for the EPP key that never comes. ICANN is nothing but a toothless figurehead setting out policies that never seem to be followed with no repercussions. Complain to them? They send you back to the registrar who tells you they can't "fix" it since the domain was sold. TO THEMSELVES.

As long as Google continues to allow squatters to run Adsense (and why shouldn't they... they make money on them, right?) and ICANN continues to turn a blind eye to predatory squatting by registrars, the practice will continue. But I'd avoid Host Department like the plague. The money I thought I would save didn't even come close to paying for my time and aggravation.
 

There is too much socializing and not enough doing.

I'm frustrated by the amount of conversation that centers around Twitter. And how Twitter doesn't work. And how it should be fixed. And how it should be distributed. And open-sourced. And we should form a committee. On groups. And then decide what to do.

And then there's Plurk, the new meme. And how it should be used. And how it shouldn't. And whether you should.

And let's not forget FriendFeed, and how to use it. And how to filter it. And why it's important. And the philosophy of.

Is anyone actually DOING anything anymore? You can't even consider it navel-gazing when everyone is so far into the collective navel that they've turned into some Beetlejuice-esque grotesquery.

Does Twitter need to be distributed to scale? No. This isn't rocket science. Far larger apps are working all day every day, and it's a darn good thing, or else the stock exchanges would collapse and our medical records would get lost and our credit card billing would be COMPLETELY out of whack.

So rather than forming a new group to discuss features that should be added/subtracted/modified and the design of a new distributed system, more people should get off their butts and build something, ANYTHING. Because I'm bored as hell of reading this stuff. And if anyone thinks it's taking Twitter too long to fix something, how long do they really think redesign by committee is going to take?

My husband will be releasing a new app in a couple of weeks, with the formal announcement coming at The Server Side Symposium in Prague. I really thought after the bubble burst that we were done with this start-up mentality of him up until all hours coding something and taking trips everywhere in the world and leaving me home with kids. It's going to be recital week for my two oldest, which means I'll have four kids to wrangle getting to the auditorium, getting make-up on, etc. Alone.

I've learned, however, that you can't keep a good developer down, especially when he's not working in a start-up full-time. He wants to build things and design them and if he's in a job where he's not doing that, then he's doing it on his own.

His first little side project was the Open Spaces Developer Challenge, and he had so much fun doing that he decided to keep going and build something else. Since he's working with GigaSpaces on that project too, I'll no longer be covering them for Profy, and will instead turn any story ideas over to my co-authors if they arise. It's a bummer, because I think they are a great company and I've been interested in their platform ever since Jason first told me what they were all about, but I'm all about making sure I don't appear to have any conflict of interest. With some of the things I see online every day in my reading, it seems like I'm one of a dying breed of bloggers who doesn't like even a whiff of conflict of interest. When I'm talking to other people looking for a platform for EC2, I include GigaSpaces competitors as well, including Appistry. I evangelze products I love with no worries in most cases, but when there is even a tangential personal involvement, I want to steer clear. Aside from future mentions of Jason's projects, which I will of course be pimping with bells on, confetti tossing, and a full disclaimer of who he is, this is probably the last time I'll tell anyone how much I think the folks at GigaSpaces rock, so enjoy it. :)