Over the past couple of weeks, two radically different hosting stories have floated across my transom. It's hard to imagine two stories more disparate than the rise of the .info domain and the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, but a strange quirk of timing meant that these two items appeared on the radar at about the same time. And they embrace two enduring truths about the Internet: some things attract a lot of attention for no readily apparent reason, and some things endure against all odds.

Dot info
About a year ago, the .info domain space experienced a huge growth spurt. A combination of knockdown prices and smart marketing, along with a brief period in which registrars literally gave away .info domains caused a massive spike in registrations. Between September 2004 and February of this year, the number of .info domains more than doubled. According to one source, there were more than 32 million .info domain names, only slightly less than the names in the .com space, and about three times the number of .biz and other domains.

	Right now, the people who gave .info domains away are sending out their renewal notices. Are people going to pay 15 bucks to keep them?

Some of these domains have been branded pretty well--the best example is probably New York's subway authority at MTA.info, which is the obvious place to look for transportation information in Skyscraper City. But honestly, is anybody else really making much use of these domains? Right now, the people who gave away .info domains are sending out renewal notices. Are people going to pay 15 bucks to keep them? I'm looking over my small collection and seeing how little traffic these domains are redirecting to my primary domains.

It's still a dot-com world out there. A few people outside of our business grasp the nonprofit nature of .orgs, not many get what .nets are about, and many people cringe at the slangy suffix .biz. Maybe some of the .info domains will survive this round of renewals, just because people don't get around to turning off the autorenewal feature at their registrars. But I predict that the number of .info domains will drop dramatically this year and this time next year. What do you think?

Real info
However, I think that against all destructive odds, Louisiana's tech businesses stand an excellent chance of weathering the storm. In the eye of the storm, panic spreads to customers of these companies. While many people were right to flee the storm, panic seems to have spread to the safe zone: out-of-state domain owners. The figures at Registrarstats.com, a top-15 chart of domain registrars, showed that some people lost their nerve about doing business with Louisiana companies. A longtime contender in the chart, DirectNIC, based in a skyscraper on Poydras Street in New Orleans, took a sharp downward spike in registered domains around the time that Hurricane Katrina struck land. That's a particular shame when you consider what the folks who weathered the storm at DirectNIC were doing: In addition to keeping the network running (and mirrored on servers in less apocalyptic cities), they also kept the world informed about the situation downtown in a series of dramatic blogs that also broadcast photos of looting suspects. Network geeks seldom make media heroes, so hats off to them for their hard work.

	The figures at Registrarstats.com, a top-15 chart of domain registrars, showed that some people lost their nerve about doing business with Louisiana companies.

And shame on the fainthearted who imagined the sky would fall on their .coms and their Web sites because of where they were registered. I'm glad to report that the Chicken Littles who abandoned DirectNIC and other southern-state hosts don't seem to have done so permanently: The top 15 domain registrars, as listed at Registrarstats.com, still include DirectNIC. And I'm also a little proud to report that I wasn't among those who deserted the Louisiana-based business: The several domains I have registered at DirectNIC stayed with them across the crisis. At no point did I notice outages of the few brochure-style Web sites I have there, and my e-mail addresses at those domains didn't drop a single letter. I've had much worse experiences with a few packages sent via USPS over the past month than the hundreds of e-mail messages per day that have crossed the transom.

That's the great thing about the Internet: It's designed to provide alternate routes for information when a single network goes down. As long as the folks who host information are sensible about keeping it decentralized and mirrored in multiple locations, disasters that strike cities don't strike data. And that's the kind of truth that's left standing when the fuss and the hype are swept away.

Is Matt Lake all wet? Should he check out his .info more thoroughly before he writes? Let him have it in the TalkBack section below.