Get paid twice a month from your parked domains. Turbo charge your commissions with the industry's highest payouts! Customize your parking templates. Traffic and click stats updated every 15 minutes.
I like this comment. It is interesting to compare what is perhaps now one of the worst monetizers in the business (bodis) with what is arguably one of the best (fabulous.com). Some of the comments by sdsinc are spot on, even with the best. Here is some interesting data from traceroute for ns1.fabulous.com and ns2.fabulous.com (the fab name servers). I will just list the last few steps of traceroute:
>traceroute ns1.fabulous.com
...
12 204.70.203.138 (204.70.203.138) 80.767 ms 80.681 ms 80.027 ms
13 csr11-ve240.santaclarasc8.savvis.net (66.35.194.82) 81.940 ms 80.604 ms 8 3.055 ms
14 ns1.fabulous.com (64.15.205.211) 80.003 ms 80.753 ms 80.030 ms
>traceroute ns2.fabulous.com
...
12 204.70.200.22 (204.70.200.22) 81.027 ms 80.739 ms 80.050 ms
13 csr11-ve240.santaclarasc8.savvis.net (66.35.194.82) 80.904 ms 81.170 ms 81.059 ms
14 ns2.fabulous.com (64.15.205.212) 81.014 ms 80.629 ms 80.910 ms
Does this sound like geographic and topological diversity in name service to you???
Good observation sdsinc.
Marc
__________________
.
(Just another mathematician obsessed with proving P != NP -- that is a math joke for job security)
Smile! In a few short years you will realize that these are the good old days!
I'm also out... Had +- 1500 visits/month with a CTR of 33%.. I guess my traffic is bad traffic... Anyways... I think i'll sell everything and leave that business...
We once again appoligize for disabling your account. Unfortunately, our upstream ad providers have been pushing us to keep ONLY high-quality traffic on the network in order to maintain our partnership throughout the following months.
Due to high demand, we have re-enabled the "Domain Management" area in your Bodis.com account. You may access your domain names to copy any customized data for your personal use. Please keep in mind, you still may not add or park any domain names on the network.
We would like to remind you once again, that all past earnings will be paid out to you during our next payment cycle, December 15th. Please be sure that your Payment Information on-file is correct. Your earnings summary and detailed payment information will be sent out to you in the following weeks.
Once again, we'd like to mention, that our click spam rates have been high over the past months. Our only choice to maintaining a partnership with our ad providers was to disable any accounts that did not have high-quality traffic. In order for us to maintain our partnership with our ad providers throughout the future months was to improve the network fraud and spam click rate by the end of November, hence our immediate actions to disable user accounts without warning. We too are disappointed for disabling your account and many other accounts. Unfortunately, it was the only choice we had to maintain our business.
Please contact support@bodis.com for any questions or concerns. Thank you for your understanding.
As a newbie, I was hooked into Bodis and I thought it best to give it a chance as my investment wasn't too much at all. Got the email and thought, what a bummer.
Either a man's venture has collapsed and he is feeling pretty bad and pretty low at the moment or it was all a scam and I'm glad I only made just over $2 since signing up at the beginning of Bodis. I only had four domains, but I would have had many many more if things hadn't turned out like this.
Never mind, it's not me that has to live with the truth, whatever that is.
I would say good luck to Matt, but I don't believe in luck. We all make our own luck and if Matt wants to make his luck like this, then....go for it dude (if it's a scam, otherwise, pick yourself up, brush down and go make millions somwhere else dude). I'll make my own luck in a much more respectful way.
This may sound a little harsh and critical but I am speaking in general terms and not directing this to anyone in particular. It is simply my feeling about this whole matter and how it is affecting everyone posting here.
I am a little surprised at all excitement this Bodis stuff has created. I am also surprised at the way people allow themselves to be victimized. I mean come on, really. Some young fella comes along and says he will "revolutionize" the domain parking industry and will single handily out-do all the established, well staffed and equiped businesses already providing this service. Bingo,everyone jumps aboard invests all their time, energy and investment into it.
Its one thing to put a few domains of insignificance to try it out and see what it is all about or spend some free time playing around with setting up the parking pages. But we got people here saying this is a business for them yet they entrust everything to the latest kid announcing his new venture that has their benefit in mind. Aren't there enough Registerflys and Kiddie Hosts doing this already to suggest that caution be used when operating your "business" or making important investments. If I was a car dealer I surely wouldn't entrust my car repairs to a backyard mechanic.
Whats worse is some would consider asking for reinstatement. Sounds to me like some people never learn or else are begging for more punishment.
Some have mentioned sueing and who knows it may be successful. However if someone sold me oceanfront property in Nevada and I tried to sue it would create a chuckle in court. I do not see this any different.
Whether a pure scam or a shady business operation the routine is the same.
1)New exciting scheme is announced. No more having to put up with dealing with the big bully you are use to. Get in early and reap the rewards.
2)People jump in head first without checking for rocks.
3)Things aren't happening the way they were told it would.
4)Everyone is reassured that things will improve.
5)We Believe!We Believe!
6)Things get worse.
7)We have faith. Whats the matter with all you non-believers don't you see what a fine job so-and-so is doing for us -after all how do all great acheivements happen without a gamble? Thank you so much for all you are doing on our behalf.
8)The lights go out and everyone is left cursing.
9)Despite the clear result there always remain a few unconvinced hangers-on.
This happens time and again. If you don't believe me follow the progress of the revolutionary green zap which declared it would change the payment processsor business since Paypal was a greedy monster fo asking 3% fees to run their business.
In summation, I don't think it is a sound practice to invest too heavily in
unproven startups especially one man basement operations. They can be fun and sometimes worth a small gamble but don't expect it to to be a winner very often.
Parking companies may seem to have the upper hand but when you look at the fact they have staff,overhead,and all the other things that make it all function such as hosting,accounting,etc is it unreasonable if they share the advertising proceeds. After all the domain owner only has buy the domain and point his nameservers. Of course I am suggesting a fare share but the domain owner shouldn't really expect 98% either.
While I am not calling Bodis as a scam as this juncture I am certain of its inability to
continue. Again lets face it, if all is as reported, there is a fourth rate ad server telling it to jump and it jumps,lie down and it lies down. To be successfull as a parking service a company has to be able to provide some leverage by saying we having a significant domain pool,do you want our business or do we go elsewhere.
Ask.com does not have an advertising base that can provide any kind of relevant ads
for serious parking the way that Yahoo and Google can provide. You're fine as long as you advertise credit cards and you can usually get a link for car insurance in Alaska.
But if your site is about Argyle socks, all your sock links take you to some online poker ads.
In turn the ads don't convert and the ad provider cries " poor quality traffic".
Eventually for bodis the end comes with a letter something like:
ping -a ns1.bodis.com
Reply from 208.75.248.90: bytes=32 time=125ms TTL=112
ping -a ns2.bodis.com
Reply from 208.75.248.91: bytes=32 time=125ms TTL=111
So we have two name servers but they are on the same subnet which means no redundancy. This is a cheap setup. I even wonder if Bodis is on a dedi box. I will just say that in the present state the setup is not mission-critical.
The IP address identifys a computers location on the internet by connection. The fact that the last number is only one digit apart means that the nameservers are probably bieng hosted at the same place or even on the same machine. That means if that hub or machine goes down the domains it directs to will be unreachable.
Good stability requires redundancy and having the second nameserver hosted somewhere else provides for a backup. What they're saying is that the hosting plan bodis is running on isn't first rate. Thats also why .de names weren't able to be parked on bodis. The .de tld requires nameservers to be in different locations for stability.
On another note, I have a question for matt. Suppose some of these 3000 kicked accounts later wanted to sign back up for bodis. Say after a few months or a year when they've have time to aquire some better quality traffic names... Are you going to give the 100% rev share back if you re-admit them?
blaknite is basically correct on the geography part. Sorry for not explaining. These are called "best practices" on the net. The dns system translates the domain names into ip. The .de tld enforces this, while in others it is a recommendation that is not enforced.
I was surprised that a well known high quality monetizer like Fabulous.com is not following recommended best practice in setting up their system. I was not even remotely surprised by bodis.com, but fabulous.com was a big surprise.
There are at least two things to consider:
1.) keep critical services like dns geographically separated, so natural problems like storms do not take out the system... or a bomb...
2.) keep critical services like dns on distinct portions of the net from a "topological perspective". That means on different "subnets" (groups of ip addresses). Routing is done by nets/subnets so "router tables" do not have to deal with every ip on the net. Basically this means that the two name servers should be connected to the net in different ways, regardless of geography.
Both geographic and topological diversity are important.
The traceroute utility traces the path from your host to the target host. The target hosts in this case were the two dns servers ns1.fabulous.com and ns2.fabulous.com. When you connect to anything (like a web server) on the net, your connection travels through a large number of "routers" along the way that tell your packets where to go. In this case there were several routers along the way before I get to ns1.fabulous.com (14 steps). What was interesting was that the last router before ns1.fabulous.com and ns2.fabulous.comm was the same. The fact that the two numbers were only one number apart raised suspicion, but it does not mean that they were on the same network (but a good hint). The same router in the next to last step adds more ammo to that suspicion. I could do further detective work to nail it, but my *guess* is that we have enough to raise serious suspicion.
...snip... (correction/deletion - thanks Patrick)
This relates to what I was talking about in another thread about my work on DARPA Ultralog, which is a system for battle-hardened survivable distributed computing.
bodis.com: no surprise
Fabulous.com: I am Shocked, Shocked I tell you (to borrow from a Humphrey Bogart movie)
Marc
__________________
.
(Just another mathematician obsessed with proving P != NP -- that is a math joke for job security)
Smile! In a few short years you will realize that these are the good old days!
Last edited by npcomplete : 11-23-2007 at 09:10 PM.
Hah!
Doubt it.
Although the idea was ' bear with me through the beta stage and this is your reward' so 100% should be available to anyone wanting back in.
__________________ CanadianDots.ca - .ca Domain Name Forum LaughLover.com - One-Liners, Bumper Sticker, Tshirt messages.
From what I know, parking companies as such aren't really large entities. Most of them started off as domain registrars, later branching off into parking companies.
As businesses, even most domain registrars are small when you compare them to other online businesses. Only GoDaddy and eNom stand somewhere in terms of customer base and profits. Moniker, Fabulous, etc., while being great at what they do, are hardly known outside of the domaining circles. Moniker still has an Alexa rank in the xxxxx range I believe, whereas GoDaddy is in the top 600.
So I'm not really surprised that these companies don't have geographically separate servers. These businesses are still small, with only one (or at most, two) offices.
You might be interested in this from a recent ICAAN Blog post entitled: "There are not 13 root servers".
Excerpts:
"...there are many hundreds of root servers at over 130 physical locations in many different countries. There are twelve organisations responsible for the overall coordination of the management of these servers.
So where does the 13 number come from?
There is a technical design limitation that means thirteen is a practical maximum to the number of named authorities in the delegation data for the root zone"
and
"...when we think of servers, we probably think of physical machines that sit on a desk, or perhaps lined up in racks in a specialised computing facility. By any measure, there are not 13 servers as there is not a correlation between the number of named authorities, and the number of servers."
Bodis really fudged it. I know it was sorta forced by Ask.com, but the guy really should have given everyone payouts or something before he terminated the accounts.
So much for a revolution in domain parking. Hah.
__________________
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. Upton Sinclair
Thanks Patrick. I rep'ed. I will go back and correct the original post. I found this comment interesting:
"In human metrics, it’s not so long, when having 13 server sites was still a truth. It may be eons if evaluated in Internet years, though."
Great to see things are much more stable than I thought. I run my own dns for a lot of my stuff, and good to see that there is now a lot more behind the hints file. While reading this link you gave I ran into this:
On the 21st:
I got the email.
Could still log into Bodis, but the Manage screen was no longer available.
Stats updated for previous day's income.
In order to not burn any future 100% revenue bridges, I PM'ed Matt like he asked.
22nd:
No response from Matt
But the stats updated with yesterday's worth of income despite most domains were returning "Domain not found in any user account." message. Suspect not all of my domains were turned off at once.
23rd (today):
No PM from Matt.
But strangely the Manage screen is back!
Figuring I got reinstated, I checked my email, nothing there either from Bodis.
The stats screen is now showing all zeros for yesterday.
)
Marc,
