pedrovera.com
Pedro is the author of The Insomniac Coder and is also Pedro Javier's dad. He is a web programmer and aspiring novelist stuck somewhere around the DC metropolitan area.
Mar 3rd, 2010 @ 12:49 pm
Verisign raises prices again
The biggest (legal, privately owned) money printing operation in the world just raised their prices again, effective July 1st.
A domain name is nothing more than a small database record, just a few kb of space. For the privilege of controlling one of such little bits of text, Verisign owns, as a monopoly, the rights to ALL .com and .net domains in the world. They allow resellers to provide this service too, at a wholesale price that is 99.99% profit to Verisign.
Basically, they don’t do a fucking thing, yet they get to rake it in.
Smart wholesalers know this is a volume game: the winners are going to be the ones that manage to get the most registrations done, which means selling super cheap. This is why GoDaddy displays a sale price that is UNDER what it costs them to register the domain, because those few cents of difference is what makes sure that they are always listed on the top 5 for raw price.
With this new price raise from Verisign, they will keep advertising the same price, yet charge a little more for the Verisign/ICANN whatever fee. We won’t do that, we have always strived to advertise a flat price to the customer, the fee is our problem, not yours.
I don’t have final word from my wholesalers as to our new wholesale price, but they have preempted this mess by giving us a very generous discount on first year registrations.
New domains are going to be $7.14 for the first year, between March 8 and March 31 2010. This is $2.75 cheaper than our regular price of $9.89 per domain. Please keep in mind that this discounted price is only for the first year for new domains. There is no limit on how many domains are purchased.
Jan 22nd, 2010 @ 1:09 pm
Slashdot Your Rights Online Story | Court Rules WHOIS Privacy Illegal For Spammers
We have had WHOIS privacy as an opt-in service since it became available. Why? Because it is an effective speed bump against automated harvesting of personal information for spamming purposes. This speed bump is also very effective against the assholes that harvest our WHOIS information from our customers, then send them domain renewal letters to try to con them into switching over to a new domain that charges a hell of a lot more than we do, and without any value added.
If you are a spammer trying to hide behind WHOIS privacy, you are wasting your time because the second that we get a spam complaint, the registrar will immediately suspend the domain.
Jan 18th, 2010 @ 2:51 pm
New SSL Certificates pricing
We have had a slight price adjustment, overall the prices went down a tiny little bit, which is good for you the customer, not terribly exciting to us working on thin margins :-)
Jul 1st, 2009 @ 9:26 am
Hosting product consolidation
We are moving all our hosting to the US, the India hosting plans are now obsolete. The new pricing structure includes the previously announced email pricing as part of the host pricing, so this price includes an unlimited amount of 1GB mailboxes. WIndows and Linux hosting prices are identical.
Another cool thing: $50 of free Yahoo ad credit!
This also marks the end of our original cpanel hosting, which is no longer offered to new customers.
May 28th, 2009 @ 1:13 pm
This week we released a simpler mail hosting package. Service is now a flat fee of $2.36/month, for that you get as many mailboxes as you want. Order here.
Feb 4th, 2009 @ 12:39 pm
1 Year of Surpass Hosting, $1
Only February 14-16, and you have to bring your own domain. This is the company that I use for one of my hosting companies, it is where I host veraperez.com. Notice that their regular price applies after the one-year mark.
@ 10:02 am
Christians Bailing on GoDaddy Due to 'Immoral' Advertising
This is truly despicable behavior by GoDaddy. I can assure you that GoPedro.net has never, and will probably never 1, resort to cheap antics like that in order to sell our very affordable domains.
We sell most domain names for under $10 per year, with no strings attached, no hidden charges and no registrar transfer locks2. And no immoral TV ads.3
*1 Tough economy, I won’t promise we won’t go the sex sells route if things get too tough.
*2 You can’t transfer a domain that is less than 60 days old. Except fot that, there is nothing keeping you from moving your domain elsewhere at the end of your first year.
*3 We can’t afford them, duh.
Jan 16th, 2009 @ 8:35 pm
Special Wordpress hosting package
For a limited time only, we are offering the following hosting package:
1. Full Cpanel access (so shell access, sorry).
2. No hard limits for parked or add-on domains, subdomains or number of MySQL databases.
3. 10GB/month traffic.
4. 1GB disk space.
5. You are free to install anything that can run on a standard Cpanel.
6. Your choice of (a) free .net/.com/.org domain or (b) .net/.com/.net transfter + renewal upon creation of account. If you would like to renew after the first year, the renewal for this domain is always included.
I am offering a limited number of accounts for $50/year. This package is NOT available through http://gopedro.net, you will need to contact me directly in order to purchase.
Dec 18th, 2008 @ 12:19 pm
New Pricing List
Thanks to the greedy bastards at Internic, it is once again time to tweak the pricing table for http://gopedro.net .
The good news:
Almost every TLD went down in price.
The bad bews:
.COM/.NET/.ORG went up slightly.
This pricing change affects both customers and resellers.
Dec 9th, 2008 @ 6:37 am
Xbox 360 v. AppleTV as a streaming platform
RIght as I was planning on writing this article, I ran into that rare Slashdot thread that sucked me into posting. Three times.
The posts pretty much summarize our current experience at home with the two Xbox 360s and the two AppleTVs. While it would be nice if Apple officially supported Netflix streaming, it is not a deal breaker, and the Xbox 360 is doing the job already perfectly.
For a while I was concerned that the ability to stream from the Mac to the 360 would render the AppleTVs obsolete, but it is only a matter of convenience. And by convenience I mean being able to watch something RIGHT THE HELL NOW instead of having to wait until the content is transcoded so the AppleTV can see it. If you can wait until the transcode, then the AppleTV wins.
Why?
1. Parental controls. The AppleTV will ask for a PIN if the content is rated above your threshold.This means that if PJ decides to park at my office and watch AppleTV, he’ll be watching his movies, not ours.
2. Content organization. The only thing you can do with the 360 streaming is put your content in folders. With the AppleTV, it will render all of your content tags, album art, etc. This means that you can navigate by title, subject, or just browse by looking at the covers. The 360 can’t do that yet.
The transcoding thing pisses me off because I have a hardware h.264 encoder dongle, which promised to be the ultimate solution. And it is a piece of shit. If it works, the best I get is barely faster than 1:1. If it doesn’t, it screws up the output by either pixelating the video, or losing audio sync. Both are aggravating as hell.
Even more humiliating is that handbrake is free and at its very worst it can transcode at 1:1 without using the stupid dongle. And it never screws up the output.
