The argument for “yes”

Thanks to the above phenomena, as well as the old monopolies on registration having long been broken, getting your own domain name is dirt cheap.  Thus, you do not always need to have a word that is found in your dictionary to be taken seriously. Get a good site going, and “Plebno.com” might be considered a brilliant, memorable name (and yes, it’s available). For instant domain name search and availability check visit pcnames.com.

A domain name is a name that will always be with you (assuming that you didn’t accidentally strike someone else’s copyright). Additionally, you can have every address associated with name@plebno.com, and you won’t be tied down to a single host.  Finally, there is a certain level of web site, mostly business-oriented, in which there is still a strong association between a domain name and a minimum level of professionalism.

The argument for “no”

If you are doing something simpler, then not only is most everyone on the web aware of all of the above problems with having your own name, but there are so many web hosts out there that can host a strong, well-done site under their own banner name that no one thinks any less of, for example mysite.blogspot.com, even if what you are hosting isn’t really a blog.

Also, there is the hassle of having your own domain.  The registration is often typically painless but, if you are trying to change the owner, or nameservers, or trying to do anything complicated at the registrar level, you could be starting at a labyrinth of emails, confirmations, credit cards, security questions, CAPTCHAs, and so forth.  If what you are running is a serious business that needs that kind of branding, then of course that is a small price to pay.  But if you are just running a hobby or educational site or even a small business site like, say, counseling, that’s just more fuss than you’re likely to want to have to deal with.

One last piece of advice. If you choose a domain name and then change your mind and let it go, you are not likely to get it back.  A harvester will snatch it right up.  But don’t worry.  If plebno.com gets taken, there’s always trozdoz.com (that’s available too).

Related posts:

• September 30, 2011 – Picking up Expired Domains – Not Always Fun, but There’s a Way
• September 27, 2011 – Common Web Hosting Terms And What They Mean
• April 22, 2011 – Becoming a Domain Speculator with No Experience
• September 7, 2010 – How to Pick the Right Domain Name Extension
• February 18, 2010 – The Cost of a Domain Name – Registering Your Domain
• July 14, 2009 – What Do You Get with a Cheap Domain Name?
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Why Should Spam Be Prevented?

Spam is a threat not only to the security but also to the productivity of every online business. Most websites become successful because of their continually updated content, which is of a high quality that visitors gain interest in. However, if your site becomes heavily populated with unmoderated spam comments and low-quality content, it is possible to experience a significant reduction in daily traffic levels and search engine rankings. In fact, it is even possible to be completely de-indexed from some search engines because of a large volume of spam on your site. Spam can also be seen in the form of automated e-mails that are submitted through contact forms on your website. E-mail spam can cause webmasters to waste a lot of time in cleaning up their inbox, reducing productivity and ultimately lowering the value and responsiveness of their customer service.

What Is a Captcha Script?

A captcha script is basically a script that is installed on your website which displays a unique image containing a random combination of characters (including letters, numbers, and sometimes symbols), which visitors must input into a form box to verify that they are not automated robots. Since captcha scripts actually create unique images spontaneously, bots are not able to read or decode them as they would be able to do with regular text. As computer programs are not able to actually view and interpret images, it is extremely unlikely that a bot will be created in the future that can decipher captcha images. Thus, captcha scripts are an effective long-term way to prevent automated spam and ensure that all of your site commenters and anyone sending you an e-mail is actually a human being.

How to Use Captcha Scripts

To use a captcha script you simply need to paste the code snippet into the coding of any form or input field. This will cause the script to randomly generate a captcha image any time the form is loaded on a webpage, making it so no information can be successfully entered into the form without the visitor first solving the associated captcha. Captcha codes can be generated in various programming languages, including PHP, ASP, and NET, making it a flexible and highly compatible spam prevention tool that can be utilized on any web site.

Related posts:

• November 6, 2009 – Use Captcha To Keep Spammers At Bay
• July 29, 2011 – Is SSL Essential for eCommerce Sites?
• August 24, 2010 – 3 Tips for Preventing Excessive Hosting Spam
• February 16, 2010 – How to Prevent Spam Attacks – Protecting Your Inbox
• February 3, 2010 – Assessing Storage Needs for Your E-commerce Domain
• May 13, 2009 – Intermedia.NET Unleashes New Exchange Solutions
• January 13, 2009 – How to Find Secure Shared Hosting
• January 20, 2012 – Data Backup and Recovery Solutions
• January 3, 2012 – Battle of the Giants: Linux and Windows Compared
• December 14, 2011 – Avira Antivirus Features

Preventing Spam Comments

There are many webmasters that will attempt to build backlinks to their web site by leaving spam comments on your pages automatically with the help of automated software. To prevent such spam attacks you will need to make sure you are actively monitoring your site comments, as well as utilizing anti-spam tools within your web hosting control panel. All modern web hosting accounts have anti-spam utilities such as Spam Hammer that will let you set filters and prevent comments that may be easily identified as spam. For example, you can create a filter to prevent comments form containing links, which would greatly eliminate spam by discouraging spammers form leaving links on your site.

Securing Contact Forms

Some spammers will spam your web site’s contact form, sending automated emails repeatedly to overload your inbox and make your job as a webmaster difficult. This is often done by the competition, so it is very important to make sure measures are taken to prevent such spam attacks as quickly as possible, especially if you have an eCommerce site or a site that advertises your services, as you will need to be able to respond to customer and client inquiries. Fortunately, you can set filters and limits within your web hosting control panel that will keep a single IP address form sending too many emails in a row. This will greatly reduce the amount of spam emails you’ll receive.

Using Captcha Images

One of the best ways to deter spammers is through the use of Captcha forms that will prevent spammers from using automated software to attack your web site with spam. Captcha forms are basically images that contain letters and numbers that are difficult to read, and nearly impossible for a software to decipher. Thus, using Captcha forms on your web site will greatly reduce the amount of automated spam on your web site. Since spammers will no longer be able to use automated bots to fill in forms, create user accounts, and post content on your site, you will be eliminating the majority of web hosting spam.

Related posts:

• September 23, 2011 – A Look at Various Anti-Spam Packages
• April 13, 2011 – Using Captcha Scripts to Prevent Spam
• June 7, 2010 – Issues to Consider when Implementing Anti-Spam Systems
• February 16, 2010 – How to Prevent Spam Attacks – Protecting Your Inbox
• November 6, 2009 – Use Captcha To Keep Spammers At Bay
• September 4, 2011 – Spam Assassin – Your Savior From Spam
• September 2, 2011 – Domain Names – Do You Still Need One
• June 29, 2011 – How to Conduct a Background Check for Web Hosting Providers
• March 2, 2011 – The Release of the February 2011 Email Security Report
• January 13, 2011 – Why Reliable Web Hosting?

Email Privacy

Perhaps the most common form of spam is email spam, which reduces your productivity by populating your inbox with unwanted spam posts. To avoid the aggravation associated with email spam, you should consider keeping your email private at any expense. That means you should not post your email address on forums, chat rooms, blogs, websites, or any other venues that can be publicly viewed by spammers. If you absolutely must to display your email address publicly online, then consider writing it without the @ symbol. For example – nospamexampleemailaddress at exampleemail dot com. The reasoning behind this is actually quite simple; spammers usually use programs that automatically search the web and scrape lists of email addresses by searching for @ symbols. Writing your email address in the above format is a great way to prevent spammers form finding your email address automatically.

Preventing Contact Form Attacks

Another way spammers can access your business email is through the “Contact Us” form on your website. If you have a contact form enabled on your website, you’ll need to make sure you have security measures in place to prevent spammers from using bots to repeatedly send emails through your contact form. Spammers love using this method to exploit business inboxes, because most contact forms only require a few simple fields to be filled out, such as name, email address, and subject. To prevent spam attacks from automated bots through your contact form, you’ll need to require the use of a Captcha form, which only a valid human could fill out.

Captcha

The Captcha test is is an entry field that is used to prevent hackers from exploiting sites with automated programs. If you have ever created an email account, then you have probably seen a Captcha form before. Captcha basically generates an image complete with a variety of letters and characters, and then requires the user to input the information on the screen. In the early days o Captcha, the images generated were simple, and as hackers adjusted to these Captcha images, the developers had to increase the difficulty of these images. The modern versions of the Captcha system consist of two to three words and are very difficult to circumvent.

Conclusion

Although spam is a common problem and is not going to disappear any time soon, there are measures that can be taken to keep spammers from targeting your email. The first step in preventing spam would be following the recommendations above and using common sense when it comes to distributing your business email address. If you’re still having trouble with spam attacks from more determined individuals like your competitors, then you may want to employ the services of a spam blocking program.

Related posts:

• April 13, 2011 – Using Captcha Scripts to Prevent Spam
• August 24, 2010 – 3 Tips for Preventing Excessive Hosting Spam
• November 6, 2009 – Use Captcha To Keep Spammers At Bay
• September 23, 2011 – A Look at Various Anti-Spam Packages
• September 4, 2011 – Spam Assassin – Your Savior From Spam
• September 2, 2011 – Domain Names – Do You Still Need One
• June 29, 2011 – How to Conduct a Background Check for Web Hosting Providers
• March 2, 2011 – The Release of the February 2011 Email Security Report
• January 13, 2011 – Why Reliable Web Hosting?
• October 4, 2010 – The Disadvantages Associated With POP3 Email

Email link – bad idea

The first thing that should be done is to toss out the idea of publicly placing your email address in any form that can be clicked as a link.  Using a linked email address publicly is an open invitation to spammers.  Nothing can be more unpleasant than having to start off your business day wading through hundreds upon hundreds of spam content in your email in-box.  If you must use this route, simply place your email in text only – this will make it harder for a potential spammer as they will have to physically copy and paste your address into any email.  Inconvenience is the bane of the spammer.

Contact form – can be attacked

If you’ve decided to place a contact form anywhere within your web site, you’ll want to enable some type of security to ensure that an actual human is utilizing the form.  This sounds simple enough because, after all, the purpose of the form is to gather human information.  However, most email forms have a standard “name”, “email”,  “subject”, “content” style to them that is easily recognized and exploited by spammers.  Using this standard information, spammers use automated systems to attack a contact form – computer to computer.  What can stump them is requiring something that only a human can input or answer and that isn’t part of the standard email form.  This is where Captcha comes in.

Contact form with Captcha – better idea

Captcha is a type of test that is used to ensure human interaction.  The premise behind Captcha is that computers should not be able to solve something that requires human input.  The very early implementations of Captcha were simple generations of a word or series of letters with some small amount of warping.  However, spammers quickly adjusted to this warping and this initial Captcha implementation had to be abandoned.  Modern Captcha uses two to three regular words that are segmented and have lines through the words making it much more difficult to automatically guess via a computer system.

This all culminates into a small bit of either PHP or Javascript that is placed within your form before the submit button coding.  After filling out the rest of the form, a user must then enter the correct words generated within the Captcha coding.  You can set the form to lock out a user after a certain number of errors thus staving off the possible attack of spammers for yet another day.

Conclusion

Of course, the simplest way to avoid spammers at all is by not allowing any sort of email contact within your site.  But this is not a feasible option – after all, you have your web site online for the purpose of contacting new and old customers or clients.  So, before putting your email form online, use a bit of quick security and incorporate Captcha.

Related posts:

• April 13, 2011 – Using Captcha Scripts to Prevent Spam
• August 24, 2010 – 3 Tips for Preventing Excessive Hosting Spam
• February 16, 2010 – How to Prevent Spam Attacks – Protecting Your Inbox
• May 26, 2009 – Web Hosting Security at Risk: Are you?
• May 7, 2009 – Protect Your Site From Maliciously Activities
• February 19, 2009 – Fighting Back Against Website Attacks
• January 13, 2009 – How to Find Secure Shared Hosting
• January 20, 2012 – Data Backup and Recovery Solutions
• January 3, 2012 – Battle of the Giants: Linux and Windows Compared
• December 14, 2011 – Avira Antivirus Features