The end to this story is that of course, I'm very very sorry, we're very very sorry, and I'm sure you're very very sorry this happened. I really am. I understand the sort of problems that an unexpected large charge to your credit card (or worse yet, your debit card) can cause. If the tone of this blog post seemed a little light, I apologize I don't mean to offend and I realize how serious an issue this is. I've been up since 3:50am trying to undo the damage and maybe I'm a little shell-shocked.

A new service is running right now (in parallel on all the controllers) that fixes all those future charges, re-enables your account if it was erroneously suspended, and if your credit card was automatically rebilled, refunds the payment automatically. You don't have to contact us or your bank, and you'll get an email when your account is finished fixing up. It's going to take several more hours to complete. There are (or were, after this incident) a lot of you these days!

The domains are so hot that domain squatters are making more profits than some of them real estate speculators. About 2.2 million new domains are being snapped up every month in the US alone, according to some estimates. Marchex, a Seattle-based public startup which has built up a massive portfolio of domain names claimed in a Business 2.0 article that it was nearly 10 percent of the global paid search market, about $9 billion or so. Another proof, Donald Trump is no money-genius.

The madness is going global it seems. IPWalk says that new .eu domain, when opened to all European Union residents last week (aka Landrush) has zoomed past the .biz domain and will lap .info in about four months. EURid, the registry of .eu, received 346.218 applications, in comparison with approximately 800.000 applications within the first 24 hours. Today there are 1.454.128 active .eu domain names, a number that surpasses 1.352.984 active .biz domain names.

Yahoo will effectively act as the preferred provider of Movable Type for small business users, taking advantage of its scale and efficiency, Anil Dash, vice president of professional products for San Francisco-based Six Apart, said in a phone interview.

"This is going to be our recommended (sales) channel for small business," he said.

Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo said it will offer commercial blogs based on Movable Type as part of its existing small business Web-site management service.

Yahoo provides customers with a unique Web address, blogging tools and business-class e-mail services with spam and virus protections for less than $12 a month.