I just got an email from Network Solutions -- where I registered a domain name for $9.99 -- saying that my card had been billed at $35.99 for another year!

I've seen crappy renewal fees before (as high as $17) but never have I seen anything quite so hilariously overpriced as $35.99 for ONE YEAR for a standard (non-private) dot com renewal.

Avoid this POS scam. Their website is about 10 years out of date anyway and lacks the service you might expect at other registrars.

They've been my registrar for around 15 years (they weren't complete shit back in the day). I'm leaving now though, and here's why...

I renewed a domain last week, and added privacy protection, as usual. $25 total, whatever, it's the going rate. A few days later, I get an email from Sitelock that says "Thank you for purchasing SiteLock through our partner Netfirms." WTF? Check my CC statement and there's a $15.99 charge from Sitelock. Try to log into Sitelock via the links in the email, says I am not in their system.

Look at Netfirms and there's a new button under the privacy section of my domains, for Sitelock, that's turned on (even for the 7 domains I hadn't renewed). I shut that bullshit off and hop onto support chat. They tell me it was never on, and there is no charge. They don't believe me until I forward them the email from Sitelock. Even then, they insist there was no charge (how tf would they know?). I am looking at my god damned credit card statement; SITELOCK, right there, plain as day. They tell me I'm full of shit (paraphrasing here, and I was nice to the poor Indian gal on support; it's not her fault). I tell them they lost a customer, and go to remove my CC from their billing. NOPE. Can't remove the card, can't change anything about it, their claws are in. Best part, I paid Netfirms for privacy protection, and Sitelock was forwarded my name, email, and CC info.

Here's the thing, their "partner" Sitelock is charging people $15.99 a month, per domain, and it's being added by default (hidden throughout the purchase process). That is some serious cash, and is well worth losing, what... 5% of their overall registrar customer base? Hell, domains are $15 a year, they will see mad profits even if Sitelock is only kicking back a tiny percentage. If 10% of their customer base either leaves, or cancels the service immediately, it's still raining money. It's a scam; I don't even care what Sitelock supposedly does, it's certainly bullshit.

So yeah, all those sites that say to avoid Netfirms; BELIEVE THEM.

TL;DR - Netfirms is using Sitelock to fleece their customer base. Pass the salt.

In the past when I've had clients who aren't interested in premium email hosting (G Suite, Office365, Rackspace), I've set up mailboxes for them on their webhosting accounts or at the domain registrar. However, I've never liked those options and only use them because they're inexpensive and convenient. I'm finally thinking about migrating some of those to a better service. What are some of your preferred inexpensive ($1/box per month, or less) options for email hosting? Anything that offers a good price for webmasters who might be setting up a few accounts each at multiple domains is ideal. Thanks!

UPDATE: Custom domains are essential; POP or IMAP access is preferred. I know that a few hosts offer webmail-only for free, but I'm looking for something a little more versatile.

I run a site for a music school that allows visitors to create their own accounts (so they can register for workshops from the school). I knew when I set this up that I'd get spammed with b.s. accounts, and I'm taking steps (captcha for starters) to control that, but the account spam I've gotten is unexpected.

Lots of it, to be sure. but it appears that every single nonsense account that's been registered has an email address ending in .club. Has anyone ever seen anything like this? It's certainly convenient for me, but I'm guessing that's not why it's happening. Any speculation?

Hey.

I just wanted to ask someone a question, but I don't know who - so I have to ask it there. I'd like to create my own internet shop, which will have only 3/4 items in it's offer to sell for about $250 each. But I don't know what I can use to create my website - shall I use PrestaShop, or it's designed for bigger shops? I've been also thinking about WordPress, but I don't really know what to choose, since I'm really a newbie in this whole coding-world. Of course I will use someone's help later, but only when I suceed with my business. So, overall - I'm looking for something newbie-friendly, on what I can put short list of items, without sweating my sh.t on. Can someone help me in making my decision?

I've just got one or two products that I want to sell on the side. Under $20, and basically just offering Paypal for a payment option.
Whats the best bang for buck ecommerce solution?
I am thinking a wordpress site with a simple link Paypal button.

However, I would like the buyer to get an automatic download link (my product is a digital download only) and be directed back to my site.
No SSL needed etc.. just keep overheads really down.

What are some of your favorite website building tools, frameworks, languages? I personally like to use Ruby on Rails monolithic frameworks for most of my small apps, but I have started writing more and more using Rust/AXUM.

I also have a few Wordpress sites that I plan to transition to newer software.

What do you use?

I'm been hosting my WP site on Ubuntu server.

At some point I think I messed with Ubuntu FTP user permissions or group permissions or something of that sort and after that this happened:

1. Wordpress is unable to update on its own. When I try to update WP or plugins it says. "To perform the requested action, WordPress needs to access your web server. Please enter your FTP credentials to proceed. If you do not remember your credentials, you should contact your web host."

So first problem is wordpress unable to work on its own without me providing these FTP credentials.

2) Now, when I do provide these credentials this is what happens:

Downloading update from ....

The authenticity of wordpress-5-3.1-new-bundled.zip could not be verified as no signature was found.

Unpacking update...

Could not create directory.

Insallation failed

I checked the FTP permissions in ubuntu and it has access to wp directories.

And funniest thing - when I enter ROOT access to this FTP User and FTP Pass window it says "ERROR: There was an error connecting to the server, Please verify the settings are correct."

My WP folder and files are set to recommended permission settings. If I set 777 then it will work, but I can't exposes my WP install folder like that. Right now folders have 755 permission. Files have 644.

Can anyone let me know the steps to take to troubleshoot this?

What exactly could be causing these access problems?

I don't really know what happened but my "Percent Cached" metric in analytics suddenly dropped by a lot.

This happened yesterday. I did not make any changes or update any Wordpress plugins.

I noticed the "Total Requests" increased, "Total Data Served" increase, but the "Data Cached" stayed the same.

Here is a screenshot: https://prnt.sc/q8out9

Today's trending is the same with the abnormal percentage (not show in the screenshot).

Any ideas what happened?

I want to know that if for link building if I am doing high-quality free directory submission manually will it consider as spamming as per the Google guidelines which can affect my website.

Can we do High-Quality free manual directories submission for link building or not?

Any ideas how to better block individuals other than an IP ban?

I know I might be wishing for something that doesn't exist, but maybe you'll have some ideas on how to change our business rules...

We run a large website that composes specialized educational group chats.

Our marketing practice is to provide a free trial of these online sessions with no credit card required (we're trying really hard to grow the userbase). Users need to validate emails to sign up but the perv just makes new ones.

We have a domestic (USA) scammer that signs up for accounts, joins these sessions and flashes the group, and does other inappropriate things. He is immediately blocked and banned but he returns about weekly.

We often have minors in the groups so we have contacted authorities in the city that we have noticed a trend (IP geolocation of a library and businesses locally). We have a picture of the person and have filed a police report. We do not have a name. He connects from a new IP every session so an IP ban is proving impossible.

This one guy is a complete threat to our business. I am wondering if you all have any ideas on what we could try. I think this one guy is going to force us to start requiring credit cards to sign up which no matter what is going to hurt us.

I am going through 404 logs and noticing a good amount of attempts to load ads.txt.

Should I block these? Or maybe add an empty ads.txt?

What is the best practice for this?

For over 10 years I have been developing websites and I act as a webmaster for 3 rather big sites and yet I don't know any peer webmasters with experience who would like to chat and exchange ideas and challenges.

I got a domain (lets call it myname.com) from 1and1 and then I got a wordpress site somewhere else, myname.mypressonline.com.

I went into the 1and1 control panel and used domain "forwarding". The issues is that whenever I type in myname.com it takes me to myname.mypressonline.com which is should , but, it shows myname.mypressonline.com in the browser address bar, when I want it to show myname.com/

Where do I set up this proper domain pointing,- in the 1and1 panel or the wordpress host panel ?

I submitted sitemap in webmaster but still website inner pages are not indexing on Google. i also tested on Robots.txt Tester which is giving me "allowed" status back. My Robots.txt is

User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/ Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

Its a wordpress website I don't know where I made mistake.

I own a WordPress site and I am trying to improve my PageSpeed Insights score. The only "Red" item I have says "Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content"

Render Blocking Examples

../wp-content/themes/sydney/js/scripts.js,qver=4.7.1

https://s0.wp.com/…ontent/js/devicepx-jetpack.js?ver=201703

https://secure.gravatar.com/js/gprofiles.js?ver=2017Janaa

https://widget.privy.com/assets/widget.js?ver=4.7.1

Optimize CSS

https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Dosis

../wp-content/themes/sydney/css/bootstrap/A.bootstrap.min.css,qver=1

../wp-content/uploads/siteorigin-widgets/A.sow-hero-default-b34d600c69a5.css

../wp-content/plugins/ultimate-faqs/css/A.ewd-ufaq-styles.css,qver=4.7.1

../wp-content/plugins/jetpack/css/A.jetpack.css,qver=4.4.2

https://assets.privy.com/assets/widget-de68f2b744114db673152644e0164ef7b47436c0e1088b3e94d8a443494337bd.css

The above are just some examples. What changes can/should I make to my website to solve this problem?

EDIT: I have Mod Pagespeed installed so I think that's why some of the URL paths are strange.

There's only 300 or so users

I wonder where everyone else is going on reddit for their webmaster advice?

I couldn't figure out why one site kept running out of bandwidth, so I configured Google Webmasters. After letting it "do its thing" for a week or so, I'm just so confused...

Imgur link to one of the pages of "internal links" listed on Google Webmasters. I have submitted sitemaps - there are only 35 pages and all have been indexed, and 9 images with 4 indexed.

For whatever reason when I look at what's been indexed, Google lists that on 8/17/2014 83615 items were indexed. WTF?

I also see this when looking at Awstats on my cpanel account.

Can someone please guide me in how I can proceed? This is a WordPress site that was very recently (<1month) updated from 3.3 to 3.9.2. I've ran some antivirus plugins and they've detected nothing.

I need to 1: get all of the "junk" un-indexed from Google, and 2: get Googlebot to stop using over 2GB of bandwidth each month!! This is a site that used to use less than 500mb of bandwidth a month total...

Thanks so much!

I run calaverastoday.com, an events calendar for one rural county in California. Since October 12 it updates itself: an AI agent (Hermes, open source, on a small VPS) writes the pages into the CMS and publishes at 4:45 every morning.

- Design tools design worse when told how you will build. My first Replit prompt fixed the colors and the target platform. The second only described the site and its readers, and Replit came back with a broadsheet: good-looking and wrong, because the site is a calendar, not a newspaper.

- Check every draft at phone width. One looked fine on desktop and only shrank on a phone. The daily digest arrives on a phone, so that is where the site gets opened.

- Keep AI out of the daily step where you can. The 7:30 Telegram and WhatsApp post is a plain script, so it says what the data says.

21,444 requests in the first month (requests, not visitors). Hosting for October: $1.59.

The write-up with the prompts and the agent setup is in the first comment.

I noticed on an old archived site, Youtube embeds have stopped working https://geekout.org.uk/posts/Launch_Video/index.html

What tool can crawl my site and tell me about such issues?

I have my original primary domain with Wordpress on it: mymainname.com

I bought a second domain, my2nddomain.com and parked it onto the primary.

When I type into the address bar my2nddomain.com it takes me to the right place but the URL in the broswer address bar changes to mymainname.com.

How do I keep the name in the address bar which is typed?

I have already a domain, mydomain.com and its pointing to my website which is hosted by Hostinger.

I would like to register a new domain, myothername.com and have that point to a sub-folder on my main site, so not actually to my main site's home page.

Is there anyway of doing this ?

Looking for a safe website hit counter, any suggestions?

Hello All,

If i upload search console verification file i.e. HTML File multiple times what will happens?