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It seems we've been nominated for the Best Business Blog category at this year's Irish Blog Awards.
Thanks to whoever nominated us!
I honestly don't expect us to win, as the competition is very strong in that category, so best of luck to all the nominees!
Hi All,
Up until recently we've left register_globals on, for the sake of cutting down on support issues with particularly iffy php code writing styles.
Today we're officially announcing that we are disabling register_globals across the board now on all our shared hosting servers.
The simple fix for this if it affects you is to enter the following string into as a .htaccess file
php_value "register_globals" "1"
We've turned it off on a few machines already, but we'll be doing the rest as the day goes on. So please wait and see if your site is affected before effecting the fix.
Issue: We're seeing errors regarding a bad PSU in a switch in DEG. We're not going to take any chances leaving it as is, so we're going to RMA the switch.
Outage Window: For customers on the affected switch, an e-mail will be sent notifying you of this downtime window.
Duration: 5-15 minutes total for the window. Each customer should only notice a small blip of around 10 seconds as they are re-patched to the new switch.
If you notice any problems please e-mail support or call the on-call number.
Update:
This will affect the following blacknight services for the duration of the move. Our primary mail relay host for dedicated customers is in this rack and will be affected by the outage. There are some other non critical services that will be affected also.
We've been offering Wordpress via an automated installer for quite some time and it's proven to be very popular.
Unfortunately Wordpress' use of SQL is far from optimal and this can easily lead to a popular blog or site causing serious issues on our servers (or anyone elses for that matter!).
We don't like enforcing certain policies on our users, but we're not left with much choice.
Due to the recent issues regarding busy WordPress websites affecting the performance of shared hosting servers, we are contacting all of our customers that are using WordPress and asking them to please look into enabling caching.
I just wish the Wordpress developers would listen to reason and enable saner caching by default.
There are two possible solutions:
- use a blogging / CMS solution that is a bit "saner" in terms of SQL and / or caching content (You'll notice that this blog has always been running on MT for this very reason!)
- install one of the available Wordpress plugins that will provide caching
There are currently two caching plugins available that we know of:
What the caching does is take the load away from the MySQL / PHP processing so that the web server (Apache) only has to serve static content, which it does very well!
If you do not enable WP Cache (or similar) there is far greater chance that if your WordPress site experiences a period of high visitors or similiar, then it could cause issues on the server.
As per our Acceptable-Usage Policy, we might have to suspend any site that causes issues like this. Putting it simply - if you're not being a considerate neighbour we might have to shut you down until you behave.
Setting up caching should only take a couple of minutes and if you have any issues or need assistance our support forum is available, as is our helpdesk
EDIT: Gary, from our technical support team, has put together a short document to help people install and configure WP Cache. You can get it from here
DomainFest draws to a close this morning with the farewell breakfast which I won't be attending.
The first SnapNames Live auction produced some interesting results, though not all domains found buyers. (I reported some of the results on my domain blog - for full results check DomainNameNews )
I'll be heading back to Ireland this afternoon via London, so I should be "back in circulation" on Monday (if not sooner!).
Registration for this year's DomainFest will be opening in little over an hour's time at 10am PST.
The organisers of this year's event are expecting over 600 delegates to attend over the event's three days.
Personally I'm looking forward to the live auctions being held tomorrow and Wednesday.
As it says on the tin. We've been working with some key customers over the past few
months regarding making more content available over IPv6. Today I can proudly announce
that Menupages.ie is now available over IPv6.
Another interesting announcement is that this site is the first site on our network powered
by IIS7 running on Windows Server 2008. Page 7 opted for Windows 2008 because of
how it natively handles IPv6 along with full IPv6 support in IIS7.
Coming Soon....
Page 7 have some other interesting websites that we'll be making available over IPv6,
this includes but is not limited to cbg.ie and there'll
be a few more to boot!!
Watch this space for more announcements.
The expression "there's no such thing as a free lunch" may seem a little overused at times, but scam artists of all shapes and sizes are still "in the wild".
In some cases being a small bit more cautious or actually reading the fine print could avert disaster (or at least go a long way to avoid headaches).
It doesn't really matter which "offer" I am referring to.
It could be Domain Registry Of America (DROA) whose modus operandi consists of sending thousands and thousands of nicely laid out and very official looking letters to domain registrants. If you get one - dump it. If you don't want to dump it immediately, by all means open it and read it. But please read ALL of it.
One of the offers doing the rounds at the moment is from Euro Business Guide.
There are a couple of things about it that raise red flags:
- they're doing it via email en masse (basically spamming)
- the wording is more than a bit misleading
If you sign up with them WITHOUT reading the fine print you could be liable for a EUR 965 charge.
Earlier today I emailed several thousand of our clients (some don't want to receive emails and have opted out) with a special offer and a link to the first customer survey we've ever conducted.
I was hoping that we'd get some responses, but I'd no way of knowing how many we would get and so far I've been pleasantly surprised by the response rate.
We weren't interested in people telling us how "wonderful" or "great" we were. There's no way that we can improve things if all we hear is positive feedback.
It's the negative comments that I'm really interested in and I'm delighted that so many people have given honest and blunt replies.
We decided to use Group Surveys to run the survey for us and I'm delighted that we did, as the reporting facility makes it quite easy for me to see what people have been saying.
I'll let the survey run for a few days, as I know from previous experience that not everyone is as obsessive about checking mail as I might be!
However it is my intention to do a number of things based on the feedback we've been receiving:
- I will publish a summary of the survey. (I just need to work out how easy that is to do!)
- I will collate the negative comments and the positive ones and publish a summary of what people have been saying as well as any responses we have at present.
- We, as a company, will be reviewing each and every response internally to see how best we can address any issues that people have raised.
While we did spend quite a bit of time coming up with the survey ie. choosing the questions we wanted to ask and how we wanted to ask them, several people have spotted glitches in it. I was hoping we'd ironed them out before making it public, but I was obviously mistaken. We can learn from our mistakes!
Issue: Iseult down
Due to an attack of some kind (report to follow after log analysis is complete) the shared hosting server iseult had to be rebooted. Post reboot the machine is now giving a grub error (grub is a boot loader).
We've dispatched a Linux engineer to the data centre to fix this issue. ETA is approx 2 hours. So @ approx 19:00 hours we expect the server to be back.
We'll update this post with more information as we have it.
Update: 18:15
The server is now booting and should return to normal service in the next couple of minutes. The raid array is degraded and is rebuilding, this will affect IO performance for the next hour or so. We'll dig through the logs tomorrow and see can we find a reason for this issue. It was however (from preliminary examinations) a customer website that was receiving a lot more traffic than normal (typically a wordpress blog without wp-cache installed/enabled) that caused the problem.
If you're an existing client or subscribe to our newsletter make sure you check your mail. We've sent you a very tasty special offer.
No. This offer is not open to the public
The following article was published earlier today in Washington Internet Daily. It is reproduced here with the publisher's permission. I posted a related article on my domain blog earlier this week.
Registrar Network Solutions could face legal action over its practice of locking in domain names that are searched but not bought, Michigan attorney Enrico Schaefer said Thursday. The action violates consumer protection laws banning deceptive business practices, he said. There's no indication on Network Solutions's website that use of its free availability search prevents other registrars from offering the name, he said. "We are considering a class action," Schaefer told us. Network Solutions defended the process as a shield for customers against other front-runners.
The practice, "domain name front-running"(DNFR) may differ from the term in its best known sense. In November, .uk registry Nominet published a paper on its experience with DNFR, calling it a "technique believed to exist, but so far unproved, whereby one person monitors the activity of a second person who is planning to register a domain name and the first person then registers the domain name before the second person." Nominet concluded that DNFR "in the most common sense of someone tracking your actions to register a domain just before you can, does not exist."
DNFR is under investigation by ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee, which in October issued an advisory on the practice and is assessing the resulting comments, an ICANN spokesman said. The panel defined DNFR as "the opportunity for a party with some form of insider information to track an Internet user's preference for registering a domain name and preemptively register that name." It preliminarily found insufficient evidence that any party involved in the registration process engages in DNFR. Nor did it set standards for judging whether monitoring name availability is acceptable or not.
Network Solutions' ploy is "more nefarious," said Michele Neylon, managing director of Irish hosting and domain registration company Blacknight Internet Solutions. He agrees with Nominet that DNFR, in classic form, doesn't take place. But Network Solutions automatically registers names that prospective buyers query on its site and warehouses them preventing them from being offered by any other registrar and ensuring that consumers are stuck paying Network Solutions's often higher prices, Neylon said.
Network Solutions Vice President of Policy Jonathon Nevett responded Tuesday to the allegations, calling the practice a security measure meant to allay customer concerns about DNFR. The measure kicks in when someone searches for an available domain but decides not to buy it immediately after the search, he said. The registrar puts the name on reserve, during which time it's not active and Network Solutions doesn't monetize traffic to it, he said. If the name isn't bought in four days it's released to the registry and made generally available for registration, Nevett said.
The effort also tries to "take an arrow out of the quiver of the [domain] tasters," Nevett said. They’re the largest front-runners, buying search data from ISPs or registries, then tasting names for profitability, he said. "Some folks might not agree with our approach, but we are trying to prevent this malicious activity from impacting our customers," Nevett said.
"This is definitely front-running," said Ross Rader, director of research and innovation at registrar Tucows. Network Solutions has "put some lipstick on it and put another name on it by claiming that this is a consumer protection measure," he said. Either way, it's using availability and Whois search data for purposes other than the actual buying process, he said.
Existing DNFR data are believed to stem from ISPs selling log files of DNS data to buyers who parse the materials for Whois queries. They then use the information, and the five-day grace period registrars have to cancel a registration for a full refund from the registry, to front-run in various ways, said Tucows President Elliot Noss. Network Solutions is using others' bad behavior to excuse its own, he said, when the focus should be on ISPs’ selling
DNS data for inappropriate purposes, he said.
Network Solutions alleges that registries are selling availability or Whois data to third parties, Rader said. In a recent blog on the Tucows site, company Marketing Vice President Ken Schafer quoted a Network Solutions spokeswoman as saying that the registrar believes some registries or ISPs or both may be selling search data to front-runners. If Network Solutions has specific knowledge that registries are doing that, "they should do the right
thing" and come forward with it, Rader said.
However the practice is labelled, it raises strong consumer protection issues, Schaefer said. The registrar is essentially "tricking" consumers into using its free search tools without telling them they won't be able to buy the name queried from anyone but Network Solutions, he said. No one has contested front-running in court. The practice is new and loss of a single domain typically doesn't generate enough damages to justify legal action, he said. But suits against registrars engaged in front-running are "viable and likely inevitable," he said.
Network Solutions informed ICANN when it launched the process, an ICANN spokesman said. ICANN is looking into the matter to see whether it complies with the registrar accreditation agreement, he said. -- Dugie Standeford
Reproduced by permission of Warren Communications News, Inc., 800-771-9202, www.warren-news.com
Every year I usually organise some kind of sale in the new year. We usually offer a discount on domain registrations or something similar.
This year I decided to take a slightly different angle.
Instead of offering a discount to everyone I thought we'd offer a BIG discount to our existing clients (and subscribers to our newsletter).
Of course we like getting new business, but it's about time we gave something extra to our existing clients.
So keep an eye on your inbox.
The email with the details will be "winging" its way to you at some point over the next 3 days.. It's worth the wait!
And if you aren't getting our special newsletters already it's not too late to sign up!!!
DomainFest is being held in Hollywood in a couple of weeks and we're proud to be one of the sponsors.
The event is one of the most important in the calendar for people involved in the domain industry and, if last year's event was anything to go by, it should draw a very interesting crowd from the four corners of the globe.
Last year I got to meet people from every aspect of the industry, so I'm hoping that this year will be similar. I've spoken to several people over the last couple of months who plan on attending THIS event since they had such a good time last year.
Unlike a lot of other industry events I've been to DomainFest manages to mix the business and pleasure to provide an almost perfect cocktail. You can easily find yourself having a drink in the bar with an unassuming multi-millionaire if you're not careful!
Of course a conference wouldn't be a conference if it didn't have speakers and at least one keynote. Last year they had TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, while this year's line up includes John Battelle, whose name may be familiar to anyone involved in SEO.
The agenda for this year's event looks very interesting and I will try to post more details as soon as they become available.
Similar to last year's event there are two "tracks" available.
If you're a DomainSponsor client, then you can learn about some of their new products and services.
However if you're more interested in hearing and discussing the latest trends in the domain name industry then the main track will be the place to be.
The topics on the agenda include new TLDs, legal issues, portfolio management and the famous networking sessions.
Last year was the first time I'd ever been to a networking session that was so intense and so incredibly productive! It's like speed dating, except it's for business contacts!
My biggest concern, of course, is not to get too involved in the live auction! It would be oh so easy to spend large amounts of money when you see the preliminary list of domains that are going to be on offer.
I'll be flying out to LA towards the middle of next week, as I want to take a couple of days prior to the event proper. At least that way I won't be able to use the excuse of jetlag if I spend the company's profits on dodgy domain names!
Sometimes it's our clients who come up with the cool little ideas.
The latest one I came across is a domain search extension for Firefox which will do a search for available domains on the Blacknight site.
You can get it here. Developed by Weeno Media and mentioned here
Very cool!
When: Starting Wednesday 9th @ 22:00 and ending Thursday 10th @ 01:00
What: Migration of Dedicated, Colocation and IP transit customers
to new Juniper network layer.
In December we bought a bunch new of Juniper routers to upgrade
our core network with. The ones that were there, were almost 2 years
old and were due an upgrade.
We'll have the new Juniper router pair pre-configured with all prefixes
and BGP sessions. We'll slot it into place and clear the arp cache
on all affected layer 2 devices and shut down the old device. There will
be approx 10-30 minutes where routes to certain parts of our network
are unavailable.
This will also remove the need for our old IPv6 configuration. We'll now
have end to end native IPv6 core running on the Juniper platform. We're
the first hosting company in Ireland to build a native IPv4, IPv6 network
core on the Juniper platform and we're very proud of this fact.
Who will be affected:
Customers on our unfirewalled network (who have their own routers or
firewalls) or IP Transit customers.
This affects both customer groups in InterXion and DEG locations. If you
are unsure if this affects you or not, give us a call or drop an e-mail
into support@blacknight.com
Summary:
On Wednesday 9th starting @ 22:00 hours we'll be performing maintenance
on the routers that run our un-firewalled and IP Transit networks.
Happy New Year!
2008 should be an interesting year.
We'll be announcing a number of new products and services this year, expanding our team again (yes - we're hiring again!) and launching a new and improved website.
Watch this space for more news ....