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Yesterday all Epassporte account owners have found a message in their account telling that Epassporte activity was blocked by VISA International and they are no longer able to issue new cards. Al the funds in member accounts have become frozen. Though Epassporte owner encourages us not to worry about this, it is a certain phenomenon in Online Business.

Several years ago a famous Russian payment system named Fethard has faced problems just like these. Funds were frozen for an undefined period of time. I haven’t seen any changes during last years, and I was happy I had no money there. But most people that had funds there have not received them yet. Since I have been living online for last 7 years, I think I can give some advices to newcomers.

1. Do not store big amount of funds on Online Payment Processor accounts. These systems are not as trusty as bank accounts and bank issued credit cards. If your account is blocked, you’ll have to wait until the situation is resolved.

2. Do log in to your online accounts frequently. I have an issue with Moneybookers, that’s why I already know that it is important. You should log in at least once a week to ensure that there are no problems.

3. Ensure that all the necessary verification steps are done. Most online payment systems require to upload documents, recent utility bills, etc. It is a good practice to contact them to find out whether you can do anything to verify your account. If something goes wrong, it is important to have a verified account.

4. Write down all the contact details for these payment systems. If their site goes down, you can get in touch with them using these numbers. Some payment providers have even ICQ support (Like Epassporte’s Michael).

5. Do not send money to unauthorized and potentially fraudulent accounts. Even if you’re planning to deal with some stuff like that, create a separate account and don’t touch your official one

6. Do not leave payment memos blank. If you perform any transfers using your online accounts, make sure that your payments have “human readable” destinations.

7. Withdraw your funds frequently. This seems to be easy enough, the only thing is you need to have funds to withdraw. This means: receive as many funds as possible

Hope this information saves you from potential financial losses.

Google has lately launched its new service named Google Public DNS. What does it mean and how do you use them? Here is a brief excerpt from Google:

Google Public DNS is a free, global Domain Name System (DNS) resolution service, that you can use as an alternative to your current DNS provider.

To try it out you need to configure your network settings to use the IP addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as your DNS servers.

If you decide to try Google Public DNS, your client programs will perform all DNS lookups using Google Public DNS.

How to do this in Linux? If you are a console fun, you should edit the /etc/resolv.conf file by entering these values:

nameserver 8.8.8.8
nameserver 8.8.4.4

Google promises to speed up your browsing experience, and to improve your security. Not sure about the speed, but security is the thing you need to think about. I have recently tried Comodo DNS and was very unsatisfied with its speed. Google should release something that should be faster than my ISP’s DNS, for me to use their service . In fact, users from small countries will see the difference, like I did.

Google Groups have relatively small amount of user warnings, and this service seems to be stable enough. You’re welcome to give it a try to decide.

Nowadays if you are running an online business, your success depends on the domain name you use. It should be short enough, easy to remember and should express your site idea. But sometimes you might need some other kind of domain names, that could be used for SEO purposes. There are some other criteria for SEO-friendly domain names, and I think that guys from domain4seo.com have explained this.  Let me post here most important ones.

• Date of domain registration
• PR: Domain PageRank.
• BL: Total number of links to domain by Yahoo.com.
• Number of links from pages with PageRank 0..10.
• Number of links from domains in .gov, .mil, .edu, .ru, .de, .fr, .es domain zones.
• YahooDir: Presence of the domain in Yahoo Directory.
• DMOZ: Presence of the domain in DMOZ.

I won’t try to explain everything about these parameters here, but you are welcome to take a look at a service I found recently. It’s domain4seo.com . These guys process domain lists and offer you the most interesting SEO domains. The price seems to be affordable for the people who are dealing with domain names, and the price for one days looks good too. It’s a pity they don’t have a free test, but when you start processing endless domain lists from registrars and domain auctions, you will consider it a good way to save your time.

I don’t encourage you to give it a try, but you can add it to your bookmarks to use it when you need a good SEO domain.

Nowadays it’s hardly possible to find someone who doesn’t like Gmail. It’s one of the best webmail service currently available; moreover it’s absolutely free. That’s why the great majority of us use Gmail for the personal correspondence.

People get accustomed to nice things very quickly. Thus after using Gmail (with its speed, filters, labels, huge disk space and etc.) we don’t even want to deal with hosting email. Unfortunately almost all the Web hosting providers cannot offer great email service; but that’s ok because no one is great at everything.

Can you get the power of Gmail using your own domain name? Fortunately, you can! Moreover some web hosts already have such an option built into control panel. Still if your hosting provider doesn’t have this option, don’t worry because you can set it up yourself. The only thing you should do is to follow the instructions…

Step 1 – Creating an account at Google Apps
Go to Google Apps and create a free account (sign up for the Standard Edition). However you can use the Premier Edition instead and get some special features, but it will cost you $50 per user per year. You will need to introduce the domain name and the necessary account information in order to set up the account.

Step 2 – Verification of your domain name
At this point Google needs to verify your domain name (i.e. if you are the rightful owner of the domain). Click on “Verify domain ownership”. Actually there are 2 ways you can do that:

1) uploading an HTML file containing a validation key to the root of your server (if you are not familiar with DNS settings, this would be the simplest and easiest option);
2) changing the CNAME record of your domain name to one specified by Google

You should keep in mind that the validation process may take up to 48 hours. Moreover there is one thing I would like to mention… If you are in the Google Apps Dashboard select Service Settings –> Email and under Web Address click on “Change URL”.  I recommend clicking on the “Change URLs for all domain services” because in this way you will be able to use all Google Apps. Here are the examples of custom entries:

http://mail.domainname.com

http://docs.domainname.com

http://start.domainname.com  etc…

Step 3 – Modifying MX records
This step is probably the hardest one… However there is no need to worry because it’s quite doable.
Your MX records are managed by your domain host or sometimes by domain registrator, if you have “Managed DNS” option enabled. Generally you can set custom DNS setting for your domain name. In order to make Google receive your email you need to replace your MX records with the ones of Google servers.  To do so just access your domain DNS settings (in case you don’t know how you can do this, contact the customer support service) and change current MX records (or add them if you don’t have ones) to the ones provided by Google:

ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM 10
ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM 20
ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM 20
ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM 30
ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM 30
ASPMX4.GOOGLEMAIL.COM   30
ASPMX5.GOOGLEMAIL.COM 30

Please visit Google Docs for additional info.

After that you just need to activate you email and wait. Altogether it may take up to 48 hours for the DNS records to be updated[v2]. As soon as they are changed you will be able to access your new custom Gmail login at mail.yourdomain.com. When logged into Gmail, you can access your domain settings simply by clicking on “Manage this domain”. Here you can change whatever you want (add new users, configure your mailboxes, change the Gmail logo to your own logo, etc.).
Hopefully everything is clear. Please let me know if I missed something.