April 2008 Archives

It's amazing what designers come up with at times!

Mouse over it to see what it's all about ....

I never thought I'd be putting Ubuntu in the office fridge, but that's exactly what I've done today.

Ubuntu cola is a fair trade certified cola drink and it has a cool name, so we got a case of it for the office.

Working for us may not be be healthy (you sit at a PC all day) but it can be fun !

For the last few months we have been regular advertisers in a number of UK magazines including Linux Format.

Print advertising is an interesting "game". You can spend a fortune and reap no return or spend very little and see your sales jump over night.

For the first few months of our advertising "run" in Linux format we didn't do anything really "special" with our ads. The ads we ran were the same as any of the ads we'd run in other publications. While I thought this was a good thing on one level I also thought it would be nice to do something a little bit different for the specific demographic of Linux Format (click to enlarge):

I've no idea where Alan, who does our print ads, found the penguin, but it brought a smile to my face.

If you'd like to be in with a chance of getting a year's VPS hosting for free, check out the Web 2.0 Ireland blog.

They've recently redone their site's design, so they're running a logo competition.

We've been getting tonnes of feedback from customers over the past couple of weeks since our VPS product launch. As Michele has posted previously we've had lots of requests for other distros. Mostly our issues with these is cramming them all onto the website. We're building an app behind the scenes to make it easier to choose the type of VPS you wanted along with the distro, OS of your choosing.

Since that'll be a few days before it's complete I've a few URLs to allow people to go in and signup for their VPS.

OpenSuse 10.3 can be purchase here.
Ubuntu 7.04 can be purchased here.
Fedora Core 7 can be purchased here.

You can navigate to different periods from within the store. e.g. you can pay for 3 months and not incur a setup or pay for 12 months and only pay for 10 etc.

Feel free to give us feedback here or on the forum and as usual if you have any issues don't hesitate to drop us a line on our helpdesk.

Today is a historical day for the IE namespace, as it has finally breached the one hundred thousand domain barrier.

The graph below shows growth over time

It will be interesting to see how long it takes for the namespace to double again in size.

Compared to some of our EU neighbours 100 thousand domains is a very small number. The UK registry, Nominet, handles in excess of 100 thousand new registrations every month!

Of course it's a bit unfair to draw parallels between the UK and Ireland.

While there have been considerable improvements in the registration process many registrants still feel that the process is quite arduous compared to that of .com.

In many ways the biggest improvement was the introduction of an API, which allows companies such as ourselves to send registration requests, updates and deletions directly to the registry.

In real terms that means that as soon as you place an order for an IE domain on our site (and pay us) it gets sent into the registry's queue.

So, if you do a WHOIS lookup you'd see:

% Application Pending - There is currently an application being processed for % the domain name you have requested. If unsuccessful, the application would % expire on the date above.

While the technology has improved some of the policies haven't, which leads to many of us having a certain love/hate relationship with the namespace.

Personally I have mixed feelings about it.

On the one hand I've been more than happy to support the growth of the IE namespace over the last few years.

The relaxation of some of the rules has made it significantly easier to register domains, but there is always room for improvement.

On the other hand I can appreciate the frustration felt by many registrants.

Being forced to provide the infamous "supporting documentation" for each and every new domain name could be seen as having a very negative impact on the growth of ecommerce in Ireland.

Whether that perception is valid or not is debatable.

If you have a valid reason to register a domain name providing the documentation shouldn't be that arduous a task.

Unlike .com there are still literally thousands of excellent names available. If you have a look at some of the recently deleted domains you might find inspiration.

Want to setup a photography business? Album.ie is currently available to register

Or maybe you are an ET fan? Alien.ie is up for grabs, or at least it was when I looked a minute ago!

One of the strong points of the IE namespace is also its perceived weakness.

Being a "managed" registry end users should have some comfort and security when they interact with a website using the .ie extension. Security, however, is not without its price.

In the .com world it is arguably "too easy" to register a domain, provide false details and setup a scam. If you want to do the same thing in IE namespace you'd have to be willing to put in a lot more work!

In order to preserve our sanity I've modified the settings here so that comments will automatically close after 120 days.

So any entry that is 4 months or older will no longer be open for comments.

Since quite a few of the posts on here are time sensitive eg. special offers it makes sense.

It also means that we don't have to plough through hundreds of spam comments on older entries.

At times I feel like I'm a broken record. I keep finding myself saying the same thing to people, possibly using different words or turns of phrase, but the message is essentially the same.

If you register a domain name and pay for it you have certain rights. Of course you also have certain obligations, but most of them aren't particularly cumbersome.

What I wrote last year still hold true.

Basics:

You are entitled to access to your EPP key for your .com without paying a fee. Registrars should provide that to you in a timely fashion.

If you want to transfer the billing of a .ie domain you DO NOT need to deal with the original IEDR reseller. If you only want to move the hosting you DO NOT need to move the actual billing.

If you want to move your hosting you should be able to do so.

Unfortunately there are no clear guidelines from ICANN mandating how resellers should handle things, so you may need to refer back to the actual registrar that the reseller is using if you run into issues.

We recently had yet another issue with a particular UK company that refuses to handover clients' domains without levying a wholly unreasonable fee. If that happens to you you should try reporting them to their upstream registrar who may be in a position to take action against them.

Another "old chestnut" is the unreasonable locking of domains by some registrars after a domain has changed hands. While the argument that it is to prevent "hijacking" holds some water it's also rather "convenient" for them, as they often get another year's registration fees from clients as a result of the restriction.

ICANN recently clarified a very important policy point - inter-registrar transfers. Hopefully this will be on the agenda at the next ICANN meeting, which is scheduled for June in Paris.

The key point raised is worth repeating here:

A registrant change to Whois information is not a valid basis for denying a transfer request.

One very large US based registrar has been denying transfers for a long time based on this. I won't name them, but it doesn't take a lot of work to find out who they are.

Paul, our overworked and under appreciated CTO (who also happens to be my business partner) has been beavering away on enabling more cool stuff for the VPS hosting solutions.

One of the most requested features over the past few days has been support for more linux distributions.

Since there are a LOT of linux distributions we had to focus on the more important and popular ones, so Debian was pretty much top of the list.

You can now order Debian VPS (without plesk) via the online shop.

Rest assured that we do plan on adding more linux distributions, but as the old adage goes - Rome wasn 't built in a day, so we'd have to humbly ask you to bear with us.

Of course you don't have to wait if you don't want to, but hopping up and down won't speed things up...

Speaking of linux distros ...

We probably won't be adding support for Gentoo for some time if ever - sorry!

And now to distract you with a pretty image:

Of course it's more than just pretty.

With the virtual server solution powered by Parallels you can easily manage your virtual server (with full root access) from within the control panel. Want to reboot it or even stop it? How about a simple mouse click?
And if you break your VPS beyond recognition you can easily reinstall it from scratch and start all over. (I think I've broken mine about 4 times in the last 48 hours !!)

I'll probably post some screenshots or a screencast of the system when I get a chance.

But if there's any topic you'd like to see covered do let us know via the comments

I've never really liked that old adage of "teaching a dog new tricks". I firmly believe that you have to learn to adapt and grow.

Launching a new product or service is a learning process. I could shove in another saying there about mice and men, but that might be overkill.

Earlier this week we launched the first phase of our new hosting services. In the first phase we introduced VPS hosting using Parallels.

The first thing we discovered was that our new VPS site was full of silly little bugs, with some links pointing to the wrong places completely, and some really odd display issues on some browsers - notably Safari. Even though I use a Mac I always use Firefox out of habit.

Thankfully people were really helpful and not only let us know what issues they'd experienced, but also pointed us in the right direction to fix them!

We also realised very quickly that we weren't really selling the products properly.

Sure, you could buy the product you wanted, but it wasn't as easy as it should have been, as we'd linked to the wrong pages from the site's main page. While this still isn't exactly the way we'd like it to be we're working on it behind the scenes

Based on feedback on my previous post about the VPS launch and the numerous emails both I and other members of our team received this week we've been working on a few things.

In the first instance we're adding more linux distributions into the mix.

The first one to be added is Debian, as so many people were asking for it. We've added that to the plans without Plesk (control panel)

We'll also be adding OpenSuse and Ubuntu, though I'm not 100% sure when yet!

There are two other things that we need to work on over the coming days and weeks, apart from the order process itself, and that is building up the documentation on the site, so that users can find the information they need easily, while the other is working on case scenarios.

People were very quick to point out that while my post included a couple of usage scenarios that they could relate to the site itself didn't.

In the words of Homer Simpson - doh!

So if you have any feedback please do share it. We take it all onboard and will do our best to implement changes based on what you, our clients, tell us that we're doing wrong - though it's also nice when you tell us we're doing something right too!

We have finally launched the first set of new products and services that we've been working on for months.

As of last night Blacknight VPS hosting is open for business.

The new VPS hosting is the perfect solution for people who want to run custom setups without incurring the costs of dedicated hardware.

For example if you want to experiment with JSP, Ruby on Rails, Light HTTPD or want to install custom DLLs on Windows.

With a VPS you have full control. The only limits are your imagination and your credit card limit!

What's a VPS?

VPS stands for virtual private server.

It's hard to put it into really simple terms, but it's a way to give you the control and flexibility of a dedicated server at a fraction of the price.

What are Blacknight offering?

We're offering a full range of Windows Server 2003 64 bit and Centos 5 (Linux) based virtual servers.

Can I get a control panel for this?

Yes. All VPS servers come with the Virtuozzo Power Panel which gives you control over the basic operations of your VPS.

If you're not comfortable managing your server over SSH / RDP then you can opt to get Plesk as well.

What about other linux distros?

We'll be adding other popular Linux distributions in the coming weeks. For the moment we're offering the most popular alternative to RedHat Enterprise

Will you be offering Windows Server 2008?

We intend to offer it as soon as it is viable ie. fully supported and tested

The entire system is securely hosted in one of Ireland's leading data centres, Interxion in Dublin, Ireland.

In the last few months we've mentioned a lot of upgrades and improvements to our network. Part of the reason for doing all this was to make way for the rollout of our Parallels network.

If anyone has any feedback we'd really love to hear it.

Let us know in the comments or if you'd prefer discretion email management@blacknight.com

We informed you some time ago of an upcoming upgrade to our billing / control panel system.

You will probably receive an email from us later today regarding our billing system.

The text of the email is below:

Dear XXX

As you may know we are currently deploying a new billing and control panel system.

In order to facilitate the migration we would appreciate your help.

Please follow the link below to create your new control panel login.

NB: We will not ask you for any personal information at any time.

To create your new control panel login, please visit

Should you encounter difficulties please contact support@blacknight.com

--
Regards
Team Blacknight
http://www.blacknight.com

Once you get this email you will be able to setup your new login for our new billing system which will be going live very soon.
If you have any queries or issues please let us know.

NB: This change affects ALL Blacknight clients

This article was originally published in April 2008's edition of Computers in Business. Since I wrote it and retain the copyright I am republishing it here:

People are always publishing articles on how to make the most out of your website or how to turn your website into “the solution” for your business.

I can’t see the point in even trying if you can’t get the basics right.

What are the basics?

The obvious things.

What does your company sell or provide?

Communicate this to me clearly in language I can understand. If I need a dictionary to read your website then you’re being too obtuse. Spell it out
for me so I can see.

How can I contact you?

Put your contact details where they can be seen without forcing me to search for them or squint.

Instil a sense of trust.

Mobile phone numbers, throwaway email addresses and PO Box numbers may suit you, but they do not give potential clients a sense of security.

Where are you based?

There is nothing more annoying than a website promoting a really cool and useful service WITHOUT telling me if it’s available in my area. (Sorry for yelling, but it’s really frustrating!!) If your service is only available in Co. Cork that’s fine, but don’t tell me it’s a “national service” on one page and restricted to Cork only on another.

Another basic thing to do is check if your website displays correctly in the most commonly used browsers. Of course if your site is “standards compliant” and can pass the W3C’s validator test then you won’t have to worry too much, so maybe investing a little bit more now will pay dividends later?

I hate acronyms.

Of course they're impossible to avoid if you work in IT, but that doesn't mean I have to like them.

RAID is one of those acronyms that really wrecks my head.

Not RAID itself which means simply Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, but the different types of RAID array that can exist.

RAID, in case you didn't know, is a way of improving redundancy and performance in servers by using multiple disks. Of course you don't have to use multiple disks, but if you don't you will run the risk of losing data.

A few months ago someone posted a very nice simple graphic that explained the differences between the various types of RAID arrays.

Taken from: http://www.epidauros.be/raid.jpg

One of our technical staff sent me a link earlier today to a bash.org quote which sums up the potential issues with single disk servers very nicely:

sterano: Whats the difference between Raid_0 and Raid_1? Steve: In Raid_0 the zero stands for how many files you are going to get back if something goes wrong.

Moral of the story - use more than one physical disk :)

I am currently very very frustrated and annoyed.

I've always tried to be honest and upfront with clients, so it really annoys me when I have to backtrack on any kind of promise.

We are about to launch a range of new hosting plans.

We can't launch the new hosting plans just yet, since there are a couple of minor glitches with the system. They're small issues. They will be fixed, but we can't launch until they are.

This is really really annoying, as I actually told several people last week that we would be launching (there are two or three clients already using the system!)

So what can I say?

Sorry?