Survey Gizmo Domain Renewal Fail Teaches Valuable Lesson

There was a pretty big story in the online marketing world that went surprisingly unnoticed this past weekend by many tech reporters and bloggers.

But if you are a member of Survey Gizmo, you probably noticed what happened.

SurveyGizmo.com, a site that we use from time to time for advanced surveys, went down over the weekend because the auto-billing on its credit card used to renew its domain failed.

According to CEO Christian Vanek: “Our domain registrar then expired our domain and immediately replaced it with an advertisement for their own website.  As far as we can tell there was no notification from the company that that this was going to happen.  They are normally a great registrar, so we assume this was a technical problem.”

While we applaud how Survey Gizmo handled the issue, getting in front of the screwup and being transparent with its customers, this should have never happened. Websites of this size should register their domain at least five years out, and there’s no excuse for having a site’s registration fail and auto-renew.

Even if it was because of a credit card that had been stolen and had been since canceled. That’s exactly why you register your domain years out, because credit card numbers and expiration dates change all the time whenever you get a new card or lose one.

Domain hiccups have happened to everyone in this business. Heck, I’ve lost some really good domains over the years, but for a company of that size, it’s inexcusable to not spend a couple hundred dollars on pushing your domain registration out a few more years … and there’s a takeaway here for all of us.

Log in to your registrar right now and renew your domain for at least another couple years before it becomes too late and you have to learn this lesson the hard way.

“This issue will not have an opportunity to resurface for a long time,” Vanek said in an email to users. “However, in ten years when our domain is up for renewal again, I can assure you that we will not have a repeat of this problem.”

SHARE

PPC costs rising year over year, but by how much?

A look at why PPC costs are rising each year.

If you’ve run PPC (pay per click) ad campaigns for an extended period of time using a service like Google Adwords, you’ve probably noticed an increase in the average cost per click for many search ads over the past couple years.

Which brought up a great question by a colleague of mine recently: “How much do PPC (pay per click) costs typically increase year over year?”

Unfortunately, even the big search marketing outfits haven’t provided a real go-to source that addresses this topic. I think a big part of it is they don’t want to scare off clients by telling them they can expect to pay 8-12% more on their PPC campaigns if they want to continue to compete each year. Read more

SHARE

Mobile App Development

We’ve been spending more and more time providing mobile app development and mobile-optimized websites for San Luis Obispo County-area businesses and content producers over the past couple years.

Our latest mobile app has just been launched as a public beta in the Android Marketplace.

If you like the great outdoors, and have an Android-enabled phone, this is the app for you. …

Hikes in Central California is a mobile hiking and trail guide for your pocket.

This content-rich app has all of the best hikes from Monterey, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties, plus many more as we continue to update it weekly.

Trail breakdowns contain trail descriptions, milestones, photographs and maps of the best Central Coast hikes.

Download the app or contact us today for a free consultation and estimate on a mobile app for your company or website.

SHARE