March 2007 Archives

The Irish Internet Association's Annual Congress is being held in Dublin on May 17th in the Fitzpatrick Hotel, Killiney.

This year's theme is "Buy, Sell and Do Business Online" and the event's organisers have been working on a great lineup from all the big names in the online industry.

Participants this year include Bebo, Google, eBay, Microsoft and Realex Payments.

We're sponsoring one of the afternoon sessions which will be focussed on monetisation - "Can you make money out of Blogs and Podcasts" . I'll post more details on the session closer to the date.

Further details of the event are available on the IIA's site

Here at Blacknight we don't release fluffy press releases.

We believe in giving you value for money and great service.

So, for one week only - ie. until Friday March 30th 2007 - we will be dropping the price of IE domains.

Register a new .ie domain for a mere 25 euro ex-vat.
Already got an IE domain? Transfer it to us for 25 euro!!

That's right - 25 euro only and you can get your own IE domain.

You don't need to host with us (though we'd strongly encourage it) and there are no silly strings attached.

This offer will end in one week so take advantage of it now!

Go to our site today and place your order!

NB: Our webmaster is editing our site at this moment, so please ignore any references to older higher prices.

I'll be heading off to Lisbon in the morning to represent Blacknight at the ICANN meeting.

It should be an interesting few days, especially in light of recent developments with XXX, ccTLDs, the launch of .asia and a whole lot more.

A number of people who were at Domain Fest in LA earlier this year will be making the trip to Portugal, so it's a wonderful time to renew friendships and maybe even talk about domains and the internet business!

Full details of the various sessions may be found on the ICANN site

There are a number of sessions covering the domain aftermarket that I will be attending, as well as others on new TLDs.

It should be both fun and informative!

This weekend is a long weekend in Ireland, as it's St Patrick's day on Saturday. St Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland, just in case you didn't know.

In time honoured tradition the entire nation of Ireland will be celebrating a collective hangover on Monday. In order for this to be practical we have all decided to take the day off.

If your server explodes or you have any other issues over the long weekend we will be monitoring things as usual. Our technical staff will respond, though they maybe slightly groggier than usual :)

Our offices will reopen at 9am on Tuesday should you have a desire to speak to us

One of the downsides to running your own network and managing all your own hardware is that you have to fix it when it breaks!

As we've mentioned several times in the past, we have been investing a lot in new hardware over the past year or so.

However, even with shiny new hardware, you can still run into problems.

So the other day we noticed some serious issues with one of our shared hosting servers - Gorlois (I really must explain the etymology of our servers at some point!).

What had happened?

Basically the hardware RAID card was not working properly. Instead of improving the disk performance it was actually bringing the server to a grinding halt.

Why?

While the hardware is supposedly supported it's just not that good.

Solution:

Move the entire server to another machine.

We normally have a couple of spare machines lying around, so we were able to migrate the entire server over to different hardware yesterday evening.

There may have been some downtime - about 10 minutes or so - for clients on the affected server, but as the IP address didn't change there won't have been any oddities caused by DNS caching etc.,

The new server is using a different RAID card, so hopefully we won't see that one developing "issues". Some geeks may find them "interesting" - as a hosting provider I could really do without them!

So there you go ... If your site is hosted on gorlois.blacknight.ie enjoy the new hardware - it's now a real monster of a machine.

Domains are big business.

Domains are big for business.

Regardless of whether you are looking at domain names from the aspect of a domain provider or simply that of a user eg. a company or hobbyist, keeping your domain name is never more important than when you lose it.

Like so many other things you don't really miss it until it's gone and if the loss of the domain is down to an incorrect email address, then you won't get that much sympathy.

Getting people to realise how important updating their email address(es) on a regular basis is not easy. It would be a lot nicer if it were to happen before an issue arose.

Why do I mention this?

I was speaking to Eamon McGrane about this for an article in today's Irish Times - Alertness needed to stay king of your domain (subscription needed)

Remember to keep your email address up to date for ALL your domain names. If you don't you risk losing your domain names!

Sometimes people misunderstand the emails we send them.

In some cases this is due to our (ab)use of the English language, whereas in others it's simply a case of the language / terminology / jargon being susceptible to confusion.

One such instance is that of "maintenance windows". They seem to cause a lot of worry and confusion to people.

So what exactly is a "maintenance window"?

Why do we refer to a "window" anyway?

The simplest way of explaining it would be to look at a tangible example.

If we are planning to swap the RAM on a server we might schedule an hour.

Does it actually take an hour to swap out the RAM on a server? No. Of course it doesn't. Anyone who has played around with computer hardware can tell you that it only takes a couple of minutes.

So why do we schedule an hour? The simple answer is "just in case".

Anything can go wrong. We would prefer to err on the side of caution.
If we told people that we were doing maintenance between 11pm and 11.15 pm and our engineers were held up in traffic, got a puncture or were struck by lightning you wouldn't be happy if your server(s) were unavailable at the "wrong" time, would you?

So even if a task should only take a couple of minutes we'll always schedule a window to cover eventualities... Hopefully we'll always manage to get the work done within the "window" we've scheduled.

Just to let you all know that MySQL 5 is now available on our Windows 2003 server plans.

We hope to make it available on Linux shortly

If you have any questions about it please let us know