Photo - Dona.com

Francois Carrillo is the promoter of this new domain registrar. His previous history in the domain industry includes Domaining.com.

Carrillo says that if you get hit with a UDRP complaint, then the insurance you get will help free legal help for an initial estimation of your chances of winning the domain name dispute.

The insurance includes special rebates for hiring attorneys from a list. Your legal expenses will be reimbursed if you win the UDRP. The cost of a UDRP legal defense is heavy. There are no insurance premiums to be paid, so it seems to be a value added offer for domain buyers.

An ordinary investor registers a domain under the assumption that it has no issues and you own it fair and square. It should not cost you anything more in legal fees to make sure you continue to own it.

A couple of points merit further discussion. DONA.com will be donating 30 percent of all its profits to the Internet Commerce Association. The ICA lobbies for the domain name industry in Washington and defends its interests with ICAAN.

The second point worth noting is that DONA.com’s domain registration rates are not rock-bottom rates for domain investors. DONA.com is a reseller for Enom.com. The rate for a .com, .net or .org domain registration or transfer is $11.15. There is the novelty and value of the UDRP insurance and the donation to the ICA. All said and done, it is still a fair deal.

The whole controversy began with the U.S. pursuit of Bodog.com, which is run by Canadians and registered in Canada.

It’s an online betting site, which is illegal in the US, meaning that they cannot take bets from or make pay-offs to US citizens.

But they were indicted for doing just this, and the US initiated proceedings to shut them down. One would assume that the US would go to the Canucks to ask them to get the Canadian registrar to shut down the site.

But the US took a shortcut and went straight to Verisign, which has the contract from ICANN to manage the .com and other generic top-level domains (gTLD). Verisign complied with the US “request” and changed the Name Server records for Bodog.com so that the site now redirects to a takedown page, instead of the server hosting the pages put up by the owners.

Wired.com looked into this subject in a little more detail to see if this was standard operating procedure in such cases, and it turns out that the official position – as stated to Wired.com by a US customs enforcement spokeswoman, is that the US reserves the right to seize or shit down any .com, .net and .org domain name if it is in violation of US law, regardless of the law in the country where the site is registered.

Way it works when they want to shut down a site is that the US usually serves court orders to Verisign, which manages .com, .net, .cc, .tv and .name, and to the Public Interest Registry, which manages .org domains. Both are based on US soil in Virginia, and so is ICANN, which is based in Marina del Rey, California.

In case you have a site at risk and want to back up your large files, there’s a service called YouSendIt.com to store and share large files. I just used this YouSendIt.com Promo Code to get a free trial.

Is actually, more than anything, a forum. So individuals can find the best deals and post about the best deals you can find what is going to allow you to obtain the best price. Not only can someone post the best deal but chances are they’ve taken advantage of it themselves and the deal is in fact good. Also others can comment on the deals let you know if they are still available worth maybe there is even a better deal.

There’ve been cases I have seen were people have found multiple online discounts or coupons, better known as promo codes, and gotten incredible deals by stacking the codes. In some cases I actually saw free computers. That was right before Christmas. But you never know what available in the best place to find it is not by looking at a company that has a staff but instead looking at a company that uses the thousands of people online.

Essentially the .tk owners decided to focus their service on the pitch that you can

transform any long url into a short .tk domain

Essentially they just make it easy, you put your long URL in and they provide you with a shorter .tk URL. You can then send anyone to your new .tk URL and they will be forwarded to the longer URL you put in. This can also be accomplished by purchasing any domain and forwarding to the longer URL. However .tk makes it free, or you can purchase additional services for a fee. Eventually if there is not enough traffic you will lose the free .tk domain unless you upgrade to a paying account.

See the .tk site here.