Summersault Weblog

A friend recently noted that 4 of the 5 web-based applications he uses on a regular basis to manage his life are officially still in “beta” status. While I think this has become a fairly standard practice for many web application providers, I hope it’s one that we still treat with some healthy skepticism and concern.

At Summersault, when we develop software applications, beta is certainly one of the stages that the software goes through, but it’s not a stage we would ever turn the public loose on. Generally speaking, here are the stages of our software life-cycle:
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Just today, we’ve received two reports of our clients getting mailings from organizations claiming that payment is needed in order to maintain or renew services related their hosting account or domain, and in both cases, the mailing was just a scam. These mailings often come in the format of an official order form that appears to be important and time-sensitive, and so it scares the unsuspecting domain owner into sending a check rather than risk losing their website.

We’ve written here before about the horrors of domain management on the Internet, but this is a particularly troublesome practice, and adds a whole other layer of complexity and hassle to an already difficult and complex system. In another recent case, one of our customers did have their website go offline briefly because they’d sent payment to the wrong organization and ignored the notices from the real domain authority - yikes! Here are a few tips to avoid being swindled by these notices:
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