In a pretty surprising announcement today in a press release, Overstock.com Chairman and CEO Patrick Byrne commented, “We have become O.CO.” Byrnes went on to say, “As a lifestyle destination, consumers can find absolutely anything on O.CO whether they are shopping for furniture, bedding, clothing, and jewelry, buying a car or home, and, soon, looking for their next vacation spot.”

It’s not often that a large retailer announces a re-branding effort like this, and it looks like the company may be ahead of the curve, as .CO will go more mainstream during the Super Bowl. The press release mixed Overstock.com and O.CO, and I think we will probably see a lot more O.CO and less Overstock.com in the near future, as using both would probably be harmful to the brand as that would be confusing.

In my opinion, Overstock has become much more than a company that sells overstocked items cheaply, as the brand name suggests. By transitioning to O.CO, the company that has done it’s best to become known as the big O, will now become the big O.

In a way, it’s similar to how Kentucky Fried Chicken moved towards the KFC branding when fried foods became a negative stigma in the US.

With the marketing efforts of the .CO Registry supporting companies like Overstock and Go Daddy, I think we are going to see more companies using .CO domain names in the next few years.

Late last year, I had some issues with hosting performance, and my blog wasn’t always stable. If it was hit with excess traffic or if a plugin wasn’t working optimally, my blog went down for generally short periods of time. The most frustrating thing about it was that it usually required a quick reset and it would go back to normal.

If I was out of the office or if it was in the middle of the night, I wouldn’t know that my blog was down until someone emailed me or until I returned and tried to log in to approve comments or write an article. I sought out a way to detect if my blog goes down, and I want to share that information with you, especially if you have mini sites that you don’t check regularly.

I use Montastic.com to monitor some of my websites, and it’s a great (free) tool. I signed up and gave them the domain names of a few important websites. When one of them goes down for some reason, I get an email alerting me to the outage. I then get a follow up when the site is functional again.

I never realized how frequently a couple of my sites went down, and after seeing this information, it got me to switch to a more flexible cloud server, where I’ve had much fewer problems.

Montastic also has upgraded plans that allow you to access other tools as well as have your website monitored more frequently. I think it’s a great tool to have monitoring your critical sites.