zhoutong

The biggest problem now is, market capitalization is just a number on paper as it can't be converted to cash easily. So essentially they are spending cash to get more value on paper.

The only time market cap helps is when they sell their share holdings, or issue new shares. Because what they are doing is to convince people to pay more cash for a share, so that they can sell to them in someway.

Also the price-to-revenue ratio is not a magic number. It's most likely to be implied from the price and revenue rather than a valuation measure. It measures profit margin potential and growth potential. (Very) fundamentally the intrinsic value of a stock is made up of 1) risk-adjusted and growth-adjusted dividend payments and 2) cash-on-the-spot upon liquidation (so called "book value"). Price-to-revenue ratio is far less correlated with these two compared to price-to-earnings ratio or price-to-book ratio.

Acquiring a company: 1) may not help EPS (most likely hurt in the short term), 2) possibly help growth, and 3) may hurt book value. That's why for most acquisitions the acquirer's stock price is likely to fall by a small amount immediately after announcement. The exact market reaction will depend on the synergy of the acquisition, i.e. the strategic benefits in the long run (like reduced competition or cost savings).

I entered the title by copying & paste from my iPad. It seems that the Unicode character was carried over. Interesting!

Thanks for the compliment!

We are releasing the API specifications in a few weeks (so subscribe to Newsletter or follow on Twitter/Facebook). Yes, it's not only a planned feature, but also a marketable feature and key selling point.

Fortunately, most accredited registrars that offer reseller programs allow domain registrants to claim back their domains and manage them directly through the registrars. So there's no stuck-with-a-middle-man issue as you described.

IMO the real danger is when the hosting provider is a registrar. Domain registrars have a lot of power, because for most TLDs the registry never touches your personal information - the registrars do. The registrars set the EPP code, which is the key to transfer your domain away. A reseller generally cannot prevent a domain to be transferred away if the registrant insists to (the most a reseller can do is to keep sending locking domain API calls).

This is exactly one of the reasons I started NameTerrific. Dealing with domain matters can be a pain, especially if there's a conflict of interest. A bonus point: almost all registrars provide web hosting services (including GoDaddy, Namecheap, Register, Name.com, eNom etc). To them there's no better up-selling opportunity.

Hover is great. It's really easy to get started and it just works. NameTerrific delivers an excellent domain experience to the other end - the hackers/developers/geeks group. Plus it's a little bit cheaper than Hover. (NameTerrific also never sells hosting. The only "extra" product we'd consider will be SSL certs.)

The landscape has been broken for a long time. The domain industry almost never evolved in the last 5 years. There's still price war, crappy experience, hijacking and spamming.

They use BitPay, which automatically converts them to USD.

Bitcoin is an unregulated financial asset, similar to gold. The fact that it exists in digital form makes the whole situation much more complicated.

Accepting Bitcoin is much easier than it was a year ago. At NameTerrific[1] we use Blockchain Wallet[2] to temporarily hold transactional funds.

Whenever a customer places an order and chooses to pay by Bitcoin, we will use Blockchain API to generate a Bitcoin address for the invoice. After the customer pays, they can press a "Check Payment" button and then the system will simply check the balance of the Bitcoin address generated. If it's greater than or equal to the invoice balance, it's considered "paid".

We keep a history of Bitcoin exchange rates (the NameTerrific rate) for tax purposes. All invoices have records of the applied BTC/USD exchange rate so they can be translated into fiat amounts in the books. For Australians, the GST is being accounted using the daily rate method (BTC/USD rate from the invoice, and daily AUD/USD rate from an official source).

The wallet gets cleared every 10 BTC or so to prevent theft.

[1]: https://www.nameterrific.com

[2]: https://blockchain.info/wallet/

EDIT: WordPress.com accepting Bitcoin is huge.

I'm sure it's using the UTC time to calculate this. The UTC never goes back.

Unfortunately, eNom only offers IPv4 glue records (we call it "Registry Records"). That's why we plan to be a registrar ourselves so that we can offer the geekiest thing possible.

DNSimple is really great. I like how they handle the web services. NameTerrific has taken a more flexible approach - we allow customers to create their own Snippets and get TSI (pretty much like AMI). So if you have a Tumblr-like platform, it will make sense to give your customers a TSI to subscribe to (and when you change your IP addresses, all of their records get updated).

Also, NameTerrific offers Anycast DNS, which is important to many users. The Unicast DNS is based on PowerDNS, the same as DNSimple, but the backend is Redis instead of MySQL - way faster.

Yes, programmatic creation of subdomains is one. Another potential use case is domain-based apps. NameTerrific will roll out OAuth support in the coming weeks so developers can control their users' domains through NameTerrific. So you can help a blogger point their domain to a blogging platform programmatically, for example.

Also, you can create a health check program that automatically drops unresponsive nodes from a round-robin DNS-based load balancing record set.

To address your concern: eNom handles all registrations currently. If NameTerrific doesn't respond you someday (I'll make sure it doesn't happen), you can claim back your domain at eNom and then you can transfer to anywhere else. The domains are yours and never ours.

Regarding the age: I recognize that being a problem now. But there's no regret. I've done what I need to and I'll prove myself with time and results.

I completely understand your point. Age is not something I can manipulate with so I don't mind facing the truth.

It's okay if you're not using NameTerrific today. I'm sure you wouldn't trust your important domains with any random startups that you've never heard of before (and you shouldn't). But let me answer your questions:

- Security. I've invested a lot of time in security. Basically the whole system is running in a private network and the only public-facing node is the load balancer. The DNS servers are running in a separate network and connect with TerrificDNS controller with a secure connection. eNom API requires IP address verification. Credit cards are stored completely outside the web service. I've paid attention to common attacks (injection, CSRF, XSS and mass assignment).

- Points of failure. DNS is a difficult thing to handle because the uptime is critical. That's why TerrificDNS Anycast uses Amazon Route 53. If you're uncomfortable with NameTerrific's DNS servers, you can choose this outsourced solution. 100% SLA.

- My background: It seems true that my age is more of a perceived-technical disadvantage rather than a marketing advantage, especially when considering the seriousness of my project(s). However, I've been coding for 6 years (with 4 years web) so I think it shouldn't be a serious limiting factor.

Thank you for your compliments! I'll prove myself with time and results.

Your argument is definitely valid and I agree with you that the economic viability is limited in the sense that NameTerrific is not an extraordinarily competitive product in the market.

However there are many small but extremely useful features in NameTerrific that are not available elsewhere, such as DNS Snippets, Profiles and Domain Admins. They simplify the domain management for web designers/developers.

I don't want NameTerrific to be the cheapest registrar, the most professional DNS service provider or a losing department of a hosting company. The vision I see is an all-in-one platform that covers every aspect of professional domain management. You get the best uptime and easiest management automatically, and you can customize the experience the way you want.

The reason that the APIs haven't been released today is because I'm adding OAuth to it. NameTerrific is designed to completely open up the domain industry to all developers.

Unfortunately domainers are never my target audience. Many professional domainers get accreditation themselves to take advantage of cheap prices and stuff like domain cancellation. There's no point competing in such a low margin field.

But well, I believe that there will be people (hopefully a lot of them) who want something simple and straightforward and are willing to spend $2-$3 extra a year to get a professional product without doing much work.

Well, I've tried a few different taglines but this one feels the best to me. Of course I'll improve it when I have better ideas. Thanks for the feedback!

I can see a huge potential in the consulting market. Many web developers/designers manage a large number of domains for their clients and they obviously want to maximize the productivity for domain-related tasks.

In the near future, we will launch our APIs as well as a white-label platform for these needs.

Your virtualmin idea is great. Yes, with APIs everything can be integrated and centrally managed.

EDIT: We're definitely interested in offering bulk discounts, email your needs to support@nameterrific.com and let's see how we can work together.

In my blog post (http://blog.nameterrific.com/2012/11/the-fix/) I have listed a few problems.

Basically the domain name industry wasn't being actively developed in the last few years. A lot of effort was spent on the business side, especially how to use domains to boost parking, hosting and SEO services revenue. I think geeks deserve a professional platform that only deals with domain names.

It's a billion industry, and it's a shame that there're few startups focusing on this business. NameTerrific was meant to fill this gap.

Hi HN,

I have been working on NameTerrific for almost 8 months. Now it's time to launch. If you are interested in some background information about NameTerrific, please read my blog post about this launch: http://blog.nameterrific.com/2012/11/the-fix/

Otherwise please leave your comments here or email me at ryan@nameterrific.com。

Your feedback is greatly appreciated!

The Chinese government is unlikely to deny claims about sensitive personal issues like this. This is especially the case if the public sentiment (both inside and outside of China) is considered. When people expect something to be true, denials can be perceived as lies and they will make things worse (for the parties being accused). The worse part is, more people will know it and more people will believe in the article.

The built-in Java was optimized for Retina display and all texts were crisp and sharp. After the update and a manual installation of Oracle's Java Runtime, everything is blurry again.

That's not true.

This one got 4269 points: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3078128

Hint: Steve Jobs

Not only that. Because the air density is different at different heights, there's actually an optimal speed for every possible height.

The optimal height of an aircraft, however, depends on the mass of itself and the payload.

It's called "social web" for a reason.

Instant messenger and chat rooms and ICQ and USENET forums and email are not web. At most the OP is talking about the history of the Internet.

{The World Wide Web (abbreviated as WWW or W3,[2] commonly known as the Web), is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web}

What's the difference between "Subscribers" and "Freemium" here? It seems to me that the freemium models requires paid subscribers.

There are always early adopters that are passionate about every new product they can find, and there are also skeptical customers that refuse to use anything provided by startups. That's actually how sustainable startups grow.

Well, it's true that database isn't horizontal-scaling-ready as described in the OP. But for many web apps, the database is not the bottleneck. Efforts should be spent on memory caching and NoSQL long before vertical scaling generates diminishing returns.

Of course, it's easy to add a master-slave replication to a single database instance when the need arises, even possible without downtime. So I assume most RDBMSs to be horizontal-scaling-ready.

The difficult part is the app stack. We need to be able to deploy more instances in minutes, not hours or days. If at the beginning we cram everything (Nginx, Unicorn and MySQL) into a single dedicated server it can be really difficult to increase the capacity in the future without downtime or additional expense. Instead, even if you don't need the power of several dedicated servers, it's worthwhile to virtualize a single server and split into a few boxes and make them horizontal-scaling-ready. Then you can clone, resize and migrate the instances.

This is what I do to increase the capacity of my app in a few minutes:

  1. Create a new instance, and load the pre-built app image
  2. Assign an IP address and add it to the DNS (like app-3.nameterrific.net pointing to an internal IP)
  3. Add the app server to deploy.rb (for Capistrano)
  4. cap deploy
  5. Add the IP to load balancer

That's it. This stack can be used from day one affordably and it can scale to potentially billions of visitors.

I used to use ELB, but later I migrated the whole app to a self-hosted private cloud on a dedicated server.

I'm using Nginx as the load balancer, and there're no session problems for me because I use the built-in secure cookie store.

For 1 and 2: AFAIK Heroku already has three layers, the Nginx routing mesh, Varnish cache and your dynos. Everything is already handled for you so if you have two dynos, the traffic will rotate between the two. You don't need a load balancer for Heroku. It's built-in.

This is almost exactly how I deployed NameTerrific (https://www.nameterrific.com). It automatically gets ready for any horizontal scaling in the future.

In addition, I allocate the workers to their own instances so that they can grow independently. Also I use Capistrano to automate deployment. Whenever additional resources are needed, simply clone the instance and add it to the load balancer.

I use 2 Nginx workers and 8 Unicorn workers in a single app instance, and they serve in HTTP at 80 and 443 (yes they respond in HTTP via port 443 and the app should assume it's HTTPS). The app instances are firewalled in a private network and they use private IP addresses.

The load balancer has two networking interfaces, one public-facing and one private-facing. It's basically a reverse proxy serving traffic in both HTTP and HTTPS (which will be forwarded to HTTP:443). So the load balancer handles the encryption entirely.

The assets get compiled during deployment, and everything gets cached. I bundle all the CSS and JS into a single package, so that there's nothing to load other than the HTML and images (natively async) in subsequent visits. The website is simply way more responsive when deployed this way. I also use CloudFront to host the assets by simply pointing the cloud distribution to the website itself as the origin. Rails will handle the assets host automatically as well.

Whenever I need to deploy or manage the database directly for any reason, I will need to connect to the private network via VPN. It's secure and just neat.

If I need to build a local mirror, I'll install another nginx box, connect to the VPN, and reverse proxy HTTPS requests to the HTTP:443 directly. This reduces the HTTPS handshaking latency while still maintaining the security. And it just works.

EDIT: Added a link to make it easier for the curious people.