[photo] Mark Jeftovic

easyDNS CEO, Career Contrarian & AntiGuru

Category Archives: Taking care of business

On the Implications of providing DNS for Wikileaks

It may not have taken long for us to lose our first customer as a result of taking on DNS for wikileaks.ch (who knows if we lost any for incorrectly blamed for unplugging them in the first place). One of the support guys just relayed the following from a customer:

“With regards to easyDNS support for Wikileaks and enemies of the State and support for terrorists overseas.
He and his clients disapprove of easyDNS position and our open support of Wikileaks.”

We may be hearing more of that in the days to come.

Taking this on was for us more … Read the rest

Where I’ve been blogging lately…..

The two or three of you who read my blog on a semi-regular basis (Hi Mom!) may be wondering where I’ve been lately. Or not. The fact of the matter is, I’ve been blogging elsewhere…..

I have been blogging on the topic of applying the principals of “value investing” as espoused by the likes of Warren Buffet, Charlie Munger, Seth Klarman, Prem Watsa, et al to the relatively incompatible field of “new media”. That is: investing in publicly traded internet and new media companies, or private assets such as web sites, web businesses and domain names. That’s been happening over … Read the rest

The Low Returns Of High Volume / High Expectations / Thin Margin Customers

There is an old expression among geeks and hackers: “fast, good, cheap: pick any two” and anybody who is a client of my company knows which two we strive for. So it has always amused me when I see any of the following:

  • companies who pick ONE of the three: cheap, and think that’s enough
  • customers who think three of three is a realistic thing to ask for
  • companies who claim to be all three

Over the lifespan of easyDNS, people have admonished me, some politely, some adamantly, that I was “playing it all wrong”. I remember a chance meeting … Read the rest

On divorcing your partners while protecting your customers’ interests.

The RegisterFly debacle has reached new heights in a cyber-age parallel to the Great Western Schism which saw Papal succession bifurcate into Pope vs. Antipope in the 14th century. The ICANN accreditted registrar seems to be operating under a similar disassociation with one side running the operation under registerfly.com (which actually wound up here on our nameservers this week) while the other runs a conflicting operation by the same name on the registerfly.net domain. No doubt, this is further exacerbates the problems for Registryfly customers, and seeing as one of the parties is now a customer, I’ll leave it at … Read the rest

One man’s minor bug is another man’s tipping point

I’ve been on the fence about dumping once of my outsourced solutions providers and bringing the functionality they provide in-house. We’ve been with them a long time, I have regular lunches with some of their VPs and trade phone calls with the CEO on a semi-regular basis. They’re good guys, we like each other. It’s all very friendly.

But business is business. I can save a nice sum of cash each year if I ditch them and bring the functionality in-house. But I didn’t pull the trigger on this during a round of cost cutting last year because the service … Read the rest

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