While waiting for my new domain to be propagated to other DNS servers, I carried out a little digging for myself. If you've read "Part 1 of DNS, CNAME What? Ramblings Of A Tired Blogger", you would have remembered that I was baffled by the appearance of this page instead of my own:
Has someone hijacked my beloved bloggerfocus.com domain and started serving ads on it?
I decided to find out more about this page and how did it appear in my domain. It was by mere coincidence while searching for a DNS query tool that I stumble upon Kloth.net. Apart from offering FREE DNS look up, Kloth.net also offered a search function called whois lookup. This function allows a user to query a WHOIS server to look up and find internet domain registration data.
I'm not sure whether you can call it intrusion of privacy, for all I wanted was to query about my own domain. So I keyed in bloggerfocus.com into the search box and click the "look it up" button. The result of the search is shown below:
The one thing that caught my attention was the Registrar for my domain. Its from a company called WEB COMMERCE COMMUNICATIONS LIMITED DBA WEBNIC.C. The search result was also kind enough to offer me the url of that company.
Another click and I was in WEBCC's main page. The first thing I search for was the About Us section of that company. This is what I got from it:
Web Commerce Communications Limited (WEBCC) is a leading provider of Internet services and ICANN accredited registrar. Founded in 2000, WEBCC started as exclusive registrar of .cc Top Level Domain (TLD) in major Asian countries.
But the question of this unknown site serving ads on my precious domain has yet to be answered. I now know more about WEBCC but I am still at square one with my problem. I continued to read more about WEBCC when I came across this:
Ah hah...I've found the answer to my problem.
If you are still in the bind about what's happening, let me dish out the facts in points:
1. I bought my domain (bloggerfocus.com) from, a local webhosting company in my country.
2. I presumed that my local webhosting company is also a Premium Partner of WEBCC.
3. My domain is considered unused by WEBCC's DNS servers since they have not received the changes I have made (probably takes a day or two)
4. Instead, WEBCC displayed their ads page on my domain.
5. I believe my local webhosting company is also taking a commission for each click on the ads served using my domain name.
Now I realized that not only that am I paying for my domain name, I am helping my third party web local webhosting company to earn extra income.
How? That's because I've been promoting Bloggerfocus.com everywhere. Reader's who visit Bloggerfocus.com (while waiting for my DNS setting to propagate) would be served with that particular ad page and a bonus pop-up. Every click a reader makes on an ad would generate income for WEBCC and its Premium Partner who sold the domain to me. At the same time this was ruining the reputation of bloggerfocus.com. Sigh....
Now I wonder if I can claim a portion of the profit they make from using my domain name? A little compensation perhaps?
If you are interested to read the entire saga, here's the link to Part 1.
Got something to say? Email me at sksee82@yahoo.com
My feeds won't work now, so bare with me a couple more days if you intend to subscribe to my site.
28st May 2008 : Free Ebooks Stash Updated - 7 New Books Added
21st May 2008 : Results For The Guess My Blog Traffic Contest
Flashing back to last nite, before I went to sleep, I thought I had managed to get the new domain name running on my site perfectly. Everything seemed to be working fine, blogger.com redirected my blogspot page to the new domain name, the links are working fine after configuring my feed to point to the new domain. I went to sleep feeling rather thrilled and satisfied with my mini achievement. Phewww.
I tried accessing my new domain again after waking up this morning, expecting to see my webpage displayed on it. To my utmost dismay, something else appeared. I was served with a page as shown in the picture below:
What on the earth just happened? Did I not point my CNAME to blogger's server? It must have been something that I've done wrong last night. Some setting that I've done at Zoneedit that has not taken affect until the DNS server for Zoneedit informed the rest of the other DNS servers about the changes while I was sleeping.
You see, last night, I tried using Zoneedit in an attempt to associate my CNAME domain (www.bloggerfocus.com) to ghs.google.com as as per stated in the instruction provided by blogger.com. It was sort of a trial and error thingy with Zoneedit (there was no step by step guide on how to perform CNAME setting in Zoneedit) where I tried different types of setting with my CNAME. I guess one of the settings worked until it got deleted by me when I tried out something else a few hours later.
The bad thing about associating CNAME subdomain, in this case www.bloggerfocus.com, is that you don't see the changes instantly. You've got wait for your changes to be propagated to other DNS servers. That could vary from a few hours to a couple of days. My curious testing with Zoneedit has resulted in my domain name going bonkers, firstly associating with google server and then with some other IP. Boo Hoo.
So I decided to take the hosting of my domain name to a more user friendly 3rd party site in order to try associating again my subdomain to google servers. Lucklily, a simple Google search led me to this FREE domain name hosting site called feeddns.afraid.org.
Thanks to last night's trial and error with Zoneedit, lots of google searches on CNAME and FeedDNS user friendly interface, I believe I've managed to solve my problem once and for all. To confirm whether my associating was done correctly, I use this tool called NsLookup to check. If you see the picture below, my query on NsLookup for www.bloggerfocus.com(the subdomain of bloggerfocus.com) shows that it is pointing to ghs.google.com
Note 20 Mac 5.00pm: My site is down again. I still don't understand why. Perhaps I should give it some time. Last check with NsLookup showed that my subdomain still point to google server. Shall leave it for 24 hours and see how it goes.
Note 20 Mac 10.00pm : My blog is back to www.bloggerfocus.com again. Redirected all queries for bloggerfocus.com to www.bloggerfocus.com again. Hope the problem is solved.
