Niketa Godbole
Niketa reads domain names out loud. It is an unglamorous habit that she picked up from watching people lose accounts to hostnames they had glanced at rather than read, and it is the basis of most of what she writes here.
888i
The hosts beat
The register of addresses answering to this name is hers, and so is the rule that governs it: the site lists hosts, it does not rank them. The address entry and the clone-signs entry both stop short of naming a genuine host, and that restraint was her argument. From outside, nobody can tell which registration belongs to whom, and a confident guess about which address is safe is the most expensive kind of wrong available on this subject.
She also wrote the entry separating these sites from the British company they resemble, which began as a footnote and stopped being one once the link data showed seventy websites deliberately teaching search engines to confuse the two.
Her working position on the whole subject is that a hostname is the only part of a website that had to be obtained rather than invented. Everything else — the logo, the layout, the claim to be official — is free to copy in an afternoon. So the address is where attention belongs, and the fifteen seconds it takes to read one are the cheapest fifteen seconds in the whole business.
Outside this site she is mildly notorious among friends for refusing to click links in messages from those same friends, and for explaining why each time.
Checked by Niketa Godbole · Addresses and hosts