SOPA blackout option

If you want to participate in the SOPA/PIPA blackout, we’ve got your back. We’ve added a UI option on the site info panel for each site that, if enabled, will make your site look like this. If you select this, it’ll last until about Thursday at 7am UTC. Then, we’ll switch it off and convert it for people who want to be able to switch it on and off over the next week.

We set all the appropriate status and caching headers so that this shouldn’t have any long-term consequences or impact on search engine rankings. (But of course we can’t guarantee that since search engines are notoriously tight-lipped about how such things are determined.) We will return status 503 (Server temporarily unavailable) which should convince the automated world that we’re simply down. Not so good for us, but worth it for the cause. We’re also telling the world not to cache the results, to keep trying hourly, and that the content expires Thursday at 7am UTC.

That’s it!

Domain pricing increase effective Jan 15

As previously pre-announced via our status feed, the cost of domain registrations will be going up on January 15th, 2012 from $8.99/year to $9.49/year.

There’s really not much to add other than that. This is in response to a change by our registrar, who are responding to Verisign once again exercising the “because we said so” clause in their license to print money, which allows them to raise prices by a percentage every year for no reason at all.

We do have long-term plans in this area, including trying to break loose pricing on gTLDs other than .com to help them compete, but nothing coming to fruition in a timeframe that would affect any decision making anyone has to do about this.