I now have over 20 domains with them, and as with all DirectI resellers, their DNS update time is amazingly fast for us in the UK, unlike godaddy which I someones have to wait upto 3 days for.

...I had some domains with them that I transferred out after finding out about their protection of spammers and spyware peddlers... See http://blogs.zdnet.com/Spyware/?p=763 or just google their name.

Host Questions

A domain hosting company operated by a convicted fraudster may be helping numerous Web sites frequented by cybercriminals to thrive, according to Brian Krebs of The Washington Post.

In his "Security Fix" column posted online Monday, he wrote that EstDomains Inc., the world's 49th-largest domain registrar, hosts a large number of sites that have been linked to spam and malicious software.

Mr. Krebs, citing Estonian Daily and information posted online by the Estonia Ministry of Justice, wrote that EstDomains' chief executive, Vladimir Tsastsin, was convicted in February of money laundering, forgery, and other financial crimes. Mr. Tsastsin received a three-year sentence and was required to serve six months and 11 days; he was given credit for spending that amount of time in pretrial detention, and has since been released.

Hillar Aarelaid, the team director of the Estonian Computer Emergency Response Team, told Mr. Krebs that EstDomains also has strong ties to organized crime.

Reached by e-mail, Mr. Tsastsin denied having ties to organized crime and said he would investigate any malicious sites brought to his attention. He also "declined to discuss or even acknowledge his incarceration," Mr. Krebs wrote.

The columnist also found several malicious sites, including two involved with selling child pornography, that had been registered through EstDomains.

In another column posted online Monday, Mr. Krebs discussed why scam sites might favor EstDomains. He wrote that its strategy of providing a separate Web server to host each domain name it registers makes the sites harder to take down.

"Anti-spam groups can blacklist thousands of spam sites in one fell swoop just by listing the handful of domain name servers that all of the sites have in common," he wrote. "But when each spam site has its own name server, it creates far more work for anti-spam groups."