Symphonious

I've been setting up a site for my wife and I to help us keep in touch when we move over to the UK next year and to let us share photos with friends and family etc. Of course this leads to the fun of picking a domain name that makes sense for us and is easy to remember. Going through the list of names we thought up, "thesuttons" was the only one that we liked and was available - but only in a few TLDs.

See, thesuttons.net, thesuttons.com, thesuttons.org and thesuttons.id.au domains were all taken but thesuttons.info was available so I registered it and set up the site. Unfortunately, it turns out that .info domains are spam. Anything containing a .info domain name in any form is considered spam. MSN was blocking my messages with the address outright, AAPT considered an email with the address in it probably spam (and took multiple hours to actually deliver it) and Brisbane City Council seems to just block the site entirely.

The TLD system has long become meaningless with companies buying their name in all the TLDs, random people buying .org and .com domains and son on. It hasn't actually been a problem though as it turns out people have brains and can work out whether a site is by a person, non-profit or company by reading the website rather than just looking at the domain name. It comes as a surprise to me then that so many of the new TLDs have been such appalling failures.

As I mentioned, only spammers need bother registering .info domains as they're assumed to be spam anyway. .biz domains are the fastest way to make your business look shonky and noone uses .us except for ridiculous pin-the-dot-on-the-domain-names like del.ic.io.us or whatever the heck it is. The worst thing is that none of these really open up much new "domain territory" because companies essentially have to register their domain in all the variants and people tend to want one of the well-known TLDs for their site. I can see a lot of people heading off to thesuttons.com or thesuttons.net by mistake because they didn't realize .info domains exist.

In the end I've done a bit of a land grab on domains and registered anything that looked vaguely usable and I'll test them out to see how it goes. Right now you can get to the site by any of thesuttons.info, thesuttons.name or thesuttons.biz. We'll see how it goes.

UPDATE: Confirmation that MSN blocks .info domains, though it's not because they don't like the domains, just a horribly broken filter for .info files to prevent viruses. I guess all that security training they did a while back is really paying off…..

Just as I'm catching up on Amazon's web services, they introduce another one - this time aimed at payment processing. My first impression though is pretty underwhelming. The one thing that FPS seems to have going for it is that it is extremely flexible. Most processing systems focus on moving a specific amount of money from a credit card to the sellers account. FPS provides options for combining micro-payments, direct debit (and proprietary Amazon funds) as well as recurring payments etc. In other words, FPS provides a ready made billing department rather than just an order processing system.

The trade off though is that FPS (at least at first glance) looks expensive. For example, Google checkout charges 2% + 20 cents per transaction regardless of value. Amazon charge 2.9% + 30 cents for credit card transactions (for amounts of $10). Amazon has much cheaper rates for direct debit and Amazon Payments, but credit cards are the main payment method over the web.

It's even worse for Amazon when you consider that Google is processing payments for free until 2008 and after that gives $10 of free transactions for ever $1 spent on AdWords. You'd definitely want to be taking advantage of the flexibility that Amazon provides.

I also can't see any benefit from using Amazon's services together so I'm not sure what prompted Scoble's comment:

Add this to Amazon’s existing S3 and EC2 services and this is significant.

There's no reason you'd pick Amazon's payment processing over Google checkout unless you really wanted to consolidate your monthly bills. It's still a good move for Amazon to keep externalizing the stuff they have to build for their store anyway, but they seem to be lacking a competitive edge in this case.

What am I missing?

I've done a fair bit more investigation into using EC2 for web hosting and it seems to be something that people do with a fair bit of success. In addition to Geert who commented on my last post and who's site rifers.org is hosted directly on EC2, there's also hanzoweb.com and www.gumiyo.com all of which just have their DNS pointing at an EC2 instance.

I still wish Amazon had a preconfigured solution that acted as the web front end and load balancer with a static IP, but it appears that it's quite feasible to just point your DNS at EC2 and your server seems to stay put.

I've also done a bunch of development against S3 with some pretty fantastic results. With a little bit of simple caching it's actually feasible to run the server here in Australia and store the data on S3 without too much pain. Having very simple APIs is nice because it allows you to build a mock S3 quite easily to use for testing without having to jump through a lot of hoops.

Overall, I'm very impressed - building a web app entirely on S3 is not only feasible, it's fairly simple and can actually speed up development. There's even a couple of personal projects of mine that S3 may be a good fit for.