I saw a TV commercial for a "free home phone" service called Ooma.com this weekend and decided to head on over to the website this morning to see what it was all about. The problem?

Their website doesn’t resolve (work) for those who do not include www. with the domain name when entering it into a browser for direct navigation! Wow!

Lost visitors, confusing customers and simply a mistake that shouldn’t happen at the stage this company is at.

Yes, we all make mistakes… but if you are advertising your company on TV, one would hope that you would have visited your own website to make sure "it works". Ooma.com is a different domain name than www.Ooma.com! www. is a sub-domain and can resolve your website differently or not at all to what is on Ooma.com itself.

cName records is often the problem when a domain name does not resolve without www. and is an easy fix at your web hosting provider or domain name registrar.

Please visit your own websites and make sure your website resolves (works) if a visitor were to type your domain name with or without www. so you are not losing visitors like Ooma.com is currently. Be sure to also check your website in different web browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc.

P.S. This "free phone" service will cost you $197 for the modem thingy!

ooma.com was registered on April 28, 2003 (it was first registered in 1997 but expired and was released from the registry in 2003). Ooma Inc, appears to have purchased the Ooma.com domain name around August 2004 from DomainBlowout.com.

Several very nice "cloud" related domain names have expired lately that are registered at GoDaddy and have went to GoDaddy.com Auctions with one of those domains being CloudServers.com which was purchased for $32,010.

Whois data has changed after the 5-7 day waiting period after the auction ended but doesn’t clearly indicate that Salesforce was the buyer of the domain. So what makes me think Salesforce purchased it?

DomainsCable.com (the email address) is listed as the "owner" in whois with everything else relating to "Private".

Here is the connection that I see…. Salesforce just used DomainsCable.com to help them get the domain name Site.com, which Salesforce just officially announced.

Clearly "Cloud Servers" would make sense for Salesforce to own. Salesforce has been buying up domain names lately…

So, I personally think that Salesforce purchased CloudServers.com for $32,010 via GoDaddy Auctions with the hired help of DomainsCable.com! I may be wrong, but that is what I think. We will see over time.

Update: Well, I guess I was wrong. DomainsCable.com did purchase CloudServers.com for $32,010 but they have stated in the comment section below that the domain was purchased for "Personal Use" and not for one of its 65 clients. That doesn’t mean they won’t sell the domain at some point, so we will see.

The next question since we are talking about it… who the hell is letting HOT cloud related domain names expire when the domains are booming right now? Nice ones as well, like CloudApp.com which sold for $24,000 to Anunt, a domain name investor, CloudServers.com which sold for $32,010 and several more "cloud" related domains that fetched $x,xxx and $xxx at expired auctions on GoDaddy.

I’m not sure who owned them, because the big ones had whois privacy on them… but whoever did own them, lost some nice bags of money by simply letting them expire. GoDaddy got the pure profit $60K+ from just the couple of expired cloud related domains.

Google Inc. secretly registered two domain names on 2/29/2012, FiveInTheCloud.com and 5InTheCloud.com with domain registrar MarkMonitor. Fast forward to 3/23/2012 and Google has launched a website on the domains! (5InTheCloud.com actually resolves to a 404 page, which is pretty funny considering! Failed redirect is my guess to FiveInTheCloud.com)

These type of domains are not common for Google to register, so it threw me off a little bit. Upon visiting FiveInTheCloud.com, it threw me off even more…

The domains states "Five In The Cloud" but the first eye grabbing thing on the website states "Six Things Worth Knowing About The Cloud"? I was confused even more, until I read the last line on the home page of the site. "So spend five minutes with your head in the Cloud. It could change everything." Now the "Five In The Cloud" makes a bit more sense. Google wants you (a financial decision maker) to understand cloud computing a little bit more.

Google is simply using the domain names as a marketing message in some way (Print, TV, Adsense etc.) to help promote its cloud services.

Google is using a company called Marketo to capture the leads generated and Marketo may also be behind the campaign itself. If you hover over the "Talk To Me" button in the 6th question, you will notice the domain name google-mkto.com for the contact form.

Overall, not the best domain to use! It’s long and doesn’t really describe anything by just seeing the domain. Confusing when the first thing you see when you get to the site, doesn’t reflect the domain. Five, via Six! I’m a bit surprised Google would use these domains, but they did and now you know about it.

P.S. Google never bothered to even register the plural version of the domains as they sit unregistered but some will like type "clouds" instead of "cloud".