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The Register4Less.com Blog - News & Updates from the Non-Evil Domain Registrar The Register4Less.com Blog News & Updates from the Non-Evil Domain Registrar Home About Contact Maintenance The Evolution of Domain Names: A Timeline from the First Registration to Today’s Modern Extensions March 21st, 2023 1985: The Birth of the Domain The history of domain names began in 1985 when the first-ever domain name, symbolics.com , was registered by Symbolics Inc., a computer manufacturer. This milestone marked the beginning of a new era for the internet, with domain names becoming a crucial aspect of an online presence. The 90’s: The .com Boom and TLD Expansion As the internet grew rapidly in the 90’s, domain names experienced a significant expansion. The iconic Top-Level Domains (TLDs), such as .com, .org, and .net, emerged during this time and quickly gained popularity. Businesses, individuals and organizations started registering .com domains at an unprecedented pace, recognizing their importance for branding and online visibility. In 1998, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was established to manage and oversee the domain name system. This organization facilitated the introduction of new TLDs, including country code TLDs (ccTLDs) like .ca, .us, .uk, .de, and .au, as well as generic TLDs (gTLDs) such as .info and .biz. ICANN is the body that oversees all accredited registrars like Register4Less, Inc. 2000’s: The Era of Domain Name Creativity As the demand for domain names surged, the 2000’s witnessed the rise of creative domain hacks and unconventional TLDs. Domain name investors and businesses sought unique, memorable names by combining different TLDs and using wordplay. For example, domains like del.icio.us (Delicious) and bit.ly (Bitly) cleverly employed unconventional TLDs to form catchy brand names. 2010’s: The New gTLD Revolution The 2010’s marked a significant turning point in the domain name landscape, as ICANN began implementing the New Generic Top-Level Domain (New gTLD) program. This program allowed for the introduction of hundreds of new TLDs, including industry-specific extensions (.tech, .travel), location-based extensions (.nyc, .berlin), and brand-specific TLDs (.google, .amazon). These new gTLDs provided businesses and individuals with more options to personalize and tailor their domain names to their specific needs. 2020’s and Beyond: The Modern Domain Name Landscape Today, the domain name landscape is more diverse and flexible than ever before. With over 1,500 TLDs available, businesses and individuals can find the perfect domain name to suit their brand, niche, or geographic location. Additionally, innovative technologies such as Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) allow for domain names in non-Latin scripts, further expanding the global reach and accessibility of the internet. From the first domain registration in 1985 to the modern array of TLDs available today, the evolution of domain names reflects the rapid growth and innovation of the internet. As we continue to embrace new technologies and platforms, the future of domain names promises to be just as dynamic and exciting as their past. Posted in Domain Registration | No Comments » Resetting WordPress Password July 24th, 2019 WordPress is the most popular Content Management System (CMS) on the Internet, making up 43% of all websites (up from 34% when this post was originally written in 2019). WordPress stores all user data, including your admin username and password in a MySQL database. For security reasons, WordPress stores passwords encrypted, making them not readable or directly writable. You can’t just connect to the database and update the username and password in plain text. You need to first use an online tool to encrypt new password. Here are the steps to follow to reset your admin login: Log in to manage your domain name, and go to the menu ProfileManage Advanced Hosting to open the Plesk interface. It will open in a new pop up window or tab. On the Plesk interface, you should see Dashboard highlighted/underlined. It it’s not, click it. Click the link for Databases. Click phpMyAdmin You should see a list of tables” in the left column. They will all have a username prepended to each table name, followed by an underscore and the wordPress table name. Look for the one that ends with _users and select that. You will see two columns with user_login and user_pass . The user_login will have your admin username. The user_pass is what we’re going to be updating. On a separate browser window, go to your favourite search engine and look up generate md5 hash . This is the way to encrypt your new password. On the site you choose, enter in your new password and have the site generate the md5 hash encrypted string. It will be 32 characters long. Select and copy (Control or Command C) the entire string. Double click the current encrypted that is on the same line as your admin user_name. That will select the entire string for the user_pass. Paste (Control or Command V) in the new encrypted password and hit Enter. You should see a pop-up message that says 1 row affected . Close the phpMyAdmin window and go back to the login screen for your WordPress website. You can now log in with your new password. Tags: Encrypted Password , Password , Reset Password , WordPress Posted in Security , Web Hosting | No Comments » Broad Support for Let’s Encrypt SSL Digital Certificates August 14th, 2018 With all of our paid hosting platforms, R4L provides you a free digital digital certificate called Let’s Encrypt. The web is quickly moving towards requiring sites to use encryption. When you order an paid hosting plan with R4L, the SSL cert is automatically installed and maintained for you, allowing your website and email to be fully encrypted. As posted on the news last week on the website Slashdot , the Let’s Encrypt open source SSL Certificate is now recognized by all major root certificates, including: Microsoft, Google, Apple, Mozilla, Oracle, and Blackberry Let’s encrypt has been trusted by almost all borwsers, it had done so thoruh an intermediate certificate from a vendor called IdenTrust. With Let’s Encrypt now being directly recognized and trusted, there is no longer a third party involved. If ever in the future there were a problem with IdenTrust (we’re not saying that’s likely), Let’s Encrypt would continue to be trusted without a problem. A problem similar to this did happen to Symantec certs when they were untrusted by Google and Mozilla . Let’s Encrypt is now directly trusted by all major browsers and operating systems. Posted in Security , Web Hosting | No Comments » Moving a WordPress Site to the Root Directory June 1st, 2017 There are a couple of common reasons people will want to move their WordPress website from a directory to the root directory. The most common we’ve seen are: They installed WordPress in Softaculous’ default /wp directory, and don’t want to have to setup a forwarder for their website. They developed their site in a directory so that their website would not be offline or interfered with and now want to replace their existing site with the WordPress site. While you can use the Duplicator plugin to create a zip archive of your website and then restore it in the root, there really is no need to create a large file to download and then re-upload. The advantage of this is the plugin will rename all of the URLs that will need to be updated. Disadvantage however is it is much slower, and potentially creates a very large file you will need to download and then re-upload. Here’s how to do the move without the plugin: 1 – Backup Your Site Before doing the move, to be safe, we recommend you use the backup wizard to create a backup of your home directory and MySQL database. The backup Wizard will download the two backup files to your local hard drive. Log in for your domain and open your cPanel Click on Backup Wizard in the Files section Click Backup,...