ICANN’s implementation of the Expired Registration Recovery Policy (ERRP), comes into effect for all Generic Top-level Domains (gTLDs) from August 31st, 2013. To ensure full compliance with this policy, Our Registrars, you and all your sub-resellers are obligated to make changes to certain processes and Terms of Use. The major changes have been highlighted here, please read on to understand the impact of these changes.

I. Compulsory communication must be sent to Registrants before and upon domain name expiry.

If your customers are set to receive the default renewal reminder emails sent by the system, then you need not do anything. Starting August 31st, 2013, the same emails will also be sent to the Registrant contact, in accordance with the policy.
If you’ve switched off the renewal reminder emails for your customers, a new set of emails to be sent to Registrants will be introduced by the system.
The Registrant contact for expiring domain names will receive renewal reminders 30 days and 7 days before expiry. A third reminder will also be sent immediately after the domain name expires.
These emails are mandatory, and cannot be turned off. However, you will be able to customize the content of these emails from your control panel.
NOTE: The customization interface for emails sent to Registrant contacts of expiring domain names will be available in your control panel under ‘Settings >> System Notifications >> Emails’ from August 15th, 2013. Please ensure that you customize these emails if needed, by August 31st.

II. Renewal/Restoration pricing and information about Expiry reminders must be displayed on Registrar and Resellers’ websites.

If you’re using Supersite, the pricing page will automatically be updated with the necessary information about Restoration fees and Expiry reminder processes.
If your customers are registering domain names through your own external website, you must ensure that information about Renewal and Restoration pricing is clearly displayed on your website. Additionally, you must also display instructions describing the manner in which Registrants will be notified about domain name expiry and renewal.

III. Registrar Registrant Agreement will be updated with Renewal/Restoration pricing links and Expiry reminder information.

The Registrar Registrant Agreement will be updated with information about the manner in which domain name expiry notifications and Renewal reminders will be sent to the Registrant.
The agreement will also carry a link to the Resellers’ Supersite pricing page, to comply with the policy.
If your customers are registering domain names through your own external website, you must ensure that they accept the terms of the Registrar Registrant Agreement at the time of registering their domain name.
NOTE: The Reseller Master Agreement will be modified to include the above aspects among the Reseller’s obligations. The new terms will come into effect from August 31st, 2013 and will be presented on our website and in the Reseller Control Panel from August 15th, 2013. You and your Sub-Resellers must ensure compliance by the effective date.
Additional Information:
You can refer to the complete ICANN ERRP announcement here – http://www.icann.org/en/resources/registrars/consensus-policies/errp

The policy only affects generic top-level domain names (gTLDs) like .COM, .NET, .ORG etc., whereas country-code TLDs such as .IN, .UK etc. aren’t affected by this policy.

Dear all,

In response to the US $ Price fluctuation, Domain Pricing has been marginally hiked for both end users and resellers. The new prices will be applicable from the 05th of July 2013

Suggested ways to Beat the Price Increase.

-> Renew Domain name for multiple years [Possibly upto 9 years] to Hedge your self from Future Price Raise or US Dollar Price Fluctuation against Indian Rupees.

If you have any queries, please feel free to contact your Account Manager or simply write in to us at sales@aalphanet.com

Thanks

Domains Sales Team
aalpha NET

As I write this post, there is an on going and highly distributed, global attack on wordpress installations to crack open admin accounts and inject various malicious scripts.

We did a detailed analysis of the attack pattern and found out that most of the attack was originating from CMSs (mostly wordpress). Further analysis revealed that the admin accounts had been compromised (in one form or the other) and malicious scripts were uploaded into the directories.

Today, this attack is happening at a global level and wordpress instances across hosting providers are being targeted. Since the attack is highly distributed in nature (most of the IP’s used are spoofed), it is making it difficult for us to block all malicious data.

To ensure that your customers’ websites are secure and safeguarded from this attack, we recommend the following steps:

Update and upgrade your wordpress installation and all installed plugins
Install the security plugin listed here
Ensure that your admin password is secure and preferably randomly generated
Other ways of Hardening a WordPress installation are shared at http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress
These additional steps can be taken to further secure wordpress websites:

Disable DROP command for the DB_USER .This is never commonly needed for any purpose in a wordpress setup
Remove README and license files (important) since this exposes version information
Move wp-config.php to one directory level up, and change its permission to 400
Prevent world reading of the htaccess file
Restrict access to wp-admin only to specific IPs
A few more plugins – wp-security-scan, wordpress-firewall, ms-user-management, wp-maintenance-mode, ultimate-security-scanner, wordfence, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/better-wp-security/. These may help in several occasions

Admin

The ongoing network connection issues that you are currently facing is due to an outage from TATA Networks end. There is a fiber cut in SMW4(optical fibre submarine communications cable) submarine cables because of which a bandwidth crunch is faced by TATA Networks.

As per the last update received by the TATA support team, restoration process of the Internet services is being carried out in a phase-wise manner. This restoration process is getting delayed since this is a major and critical outage on multiple submarine cables. Partial traffic has been restored and TATA teams are working to restore the rest of the traffic at the earliest.

Affected area:
(SEA-ME-WE 4) – South East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 4, so only Indian customers are facing this issue.
ISP’s like Airtel/MTNL/BSNL use TATA connection as their backbone and the current outage has impacted many such ISP’s.

Affected services:
You will experience sluggishness while accessing your websites and downloading emails.

We will keep you updated via this post as we get further details.

Dear all,

We here by would like to inform you Important Announcement.

It has come to our notice that many customer are receiving calls / SMS from fraudulent Companies, seeking renewals of domain names and hosting at discounted rates, Such companies then threaten the customers with exorbitant renewal rates from next year.

Few of companies have reportedly ripped off customers of their domain names.
We would sincerely request our customer to not fall in such trap.
Though these companies appear cheap at first instance, they could turn out very expensive. All the renewal is to be placed in the name of aalpha NET only. Please do not pay any further charges any to other companies without concerning to aalpha NET team.

If you receive any kind of such mail or Hard copy of invoice from any other company than aalpha NET, then kindly let us know our contact no. : 0452 4374875 or send a mail to : domains@aalphanet.com

Regards

Domains Team
aalpha NET