May 2008 Archives

It's interesting to see that the media has been giving some more coverage to IPv6 over the last couple of days.

I was interviewed by ENN yesterday afternoon for a piece they put out in the evening:

EC urges speedy adoption of IPv6

Basically the EU is beginning to take an interest so there may, finally, be some movement.

Of course the only way it's going to happen is if people are able to use it, so broadband providers need to be encouraged to roll it out.

If you want to play around with IPv6 you could start by asking your current ISP what their plans are.

ICANN released a handy document that covers the salient points last year:
IPv6 document

Over the last year or so we've been doing a bit of advertising in DotNet Magazine in the UK (and US).

Last week two of the Future Publishing advertising staff came round to visit our offices here in Carlow bearing gifts. They presented me with a very tasty LaCie Ora Ito designed Golden Disk with the DotNet logo on it (see photo above).

There's no reason why external hard drives can't look attractive as well as being functional, is there?

At 12 today the IE Domain Registry will do it's latest domain deletion run. If you're on the lookout for a "tasty" IE domain then check the deleted list anytime after 12.

You never know what you might find!

What's the catch?

There is no catch.

Do dropped IE domains cost more?

No. They cost exactly the same as any other new registration. We're currently charging a mere € 21 (ex-vat)

Do you know if a particular domain will become available today?

No. We can only see which domains we are billing contact for will become available and when. If you are interested in a particular domain we'd recommend checking its registration status. If the domain is showing "suspended" instead of "active" then it's probably going to drop off very soon.

How often do the IE Domain Registry delete domains?

Every two weeks.

Where can I get a list of dropped IE domains?

There's a list of them on our site here.

Why would I register a dropped domain?

There are a lot of reasons why dropped domains can be attractive.
In some cases it can simply be a case of a relevant domain. In others you might be able to pick up some traffic quickly, as an established site might have links pointing to it.

Due to maintenance being conducted by Eurid, the organisation that manages dotEU, we will be unable to process new registrations or updates to EU domains this Saturday, May 24th.

Eurid are expanding their infrastructure and migrating servers etc., to a new data centre. As a result of this they've decided to take the registry backend offline for upto six hours on Saturday starting at 8am Irish time (9am Belgian time).

UPDATE: All services should be working as normal

Every time I write one of these "heads up" posts I silently hope and pray that it will be the last. Of course it never is.

At present there are two scams doing the rounds.

Our "friends" in Domain Registry of America are still sending out letters to thousands of domain holders. As I've said before - dump the letters if you get them. You can read them if you want, but you're better off simply ignoring them completely.

Another, more disturbing, scam is being sent around by EU Business Services Ltd promoting the "EU Company Directory".

The devil is in the details, so if you look at the fine print you will find that signing off on a "simple" listing will set you back close to 1000 euro! I think I've personally received about 6 emails from these people about their "wonderful service" in the past few days. Do yourself a favour - bin it!

Basically they're doing the same thing as Euro Business Guide. They're probably the same people.

We've been encountering some issues with Paypal integration with billing.blacknight.ie, so we have temporarily disabled Paypal payments.

This DOES NOT affect blacknightVPS.com

We hope to have this resolved later today, but it may take longer

UPDATE: This issue has been resolved

Every time a new TLD launches the registry operators have to come up with ways of distributing "premium" names.

Premium names are the "super" domains that are usually dictionary words or close to them. These domains are easy to remember and easy to get to. The most heavily demanded ones are usually related to the adult industry, so it's not surprising to see that there is always a heavy demand for sex.tld (where tld is the TLD in question)

In the case of dotEU Eurid ran a couple of "sunrise" periods, which were open to trademark and other prior rights holders ie. entities that had a valid claim on a name via a trademark or other method. Even though dotEU has been up and running for some time there are still plenty of legal battles being fought over the sunrise domains.

With dotAsia they have opted for a number of sunrise periods as well, but they also added in an auction scheme to make it more "interesting". If more than one request was made for a domain name in landrush then the domain is automatically put into an auction which is being managed by Pool. What makes it all the more interesting is that some people are suspecting foul play.

Personally I find the entire system of auctions quite confusing and frustrating, as I've ended up bidding against myself for at least one name. I won't be able to use the domain until someone wins the auction!

Oh well... hopefully dotTel will do a better job of their launch!

As of a few minutes ago we have dropped the price of IE domains across the board.

No special links or coupons required.

ALL IE domains are now 21 euro ex-vat for both new registrations and renewals.

We've also got a list of the latest dropped IE domains, so you can grab a previously owned domain - nothing wrong with secondhand domains!

Well it isn't quite Web 2.0. But it's now new and improved and shiny.

And before I get any complaints, we know Safari doesn't look perfect yet :-).

We've removed .net and Linux VPS plans, you now have a simplified version of the site that has VPS plans that are OS agnostic. When you click buy now you'll be able to use our fancy vps-shop web application to choose your OS and the package you want and whether or not you want to add Plesk!

So where is this fancy application I hear you cry. Any buy now link on Blacknightvps.com will now take you to it.

All pricing for each period and for plesk etc is all contained within the web app.

There's a few small issues outstanding that we'll be fixing in time.

1) Safari doesn't work well right now (if at all :/)
2) The initial page load is a little slow, we're aware of this, it's because of the volume of information being retrieved from our backend that causes this, we're working on it.
3) Changing OS doesn't appear to keep your selected options in all browsers. However if you change plan from basic to standard it keeps all your choices!
4) Non javascript users we'll have a more accessible version soon (within a week or two) that'll work particularly well for the visually impaired.

Please let us know what you think of the new simplified version of the site.

All feedback and comments are welcome.

Ok so the one question we've been asked over and over again was:

"How many IPs can I have with my VPS?"

When we launched initially we said 1 IP address.

Then we gave a second free and now we're going to give you up to 10 IPs but the downside is there'll be a small charge for additional IPs.

On our shared hosting you can only get 1 dedicated IP address, so our VPS plans give you more IPs for free for a start and also the ability to add more.

The magical upper limit that we've set is 10 IPs.

Each additional IP (after the 2 we give free!) costs 2 Euro per month.

This fee is an administrative fee and doesn't give you ownership of the IP but rather the ability to make use of it.

It is added to your account for your exclusive use. After you buy them you can click IP addresses in VPS management and click Add new.

The upper limit we'll look at later once the product matures more and people start giving out to me looking for more IPs. :-)

I'm delighted to announce that the IE zone rebuilds are now more frequent.

The new zone rebuild times are:
10:00, 12:00, 17:00 and 22:00

AND it is set to rebuild 7 days a week, 365 days a year!

This is a major improvement for IE domain holders, as now updates, changes and new registrations will be processed much more efficiently.

As we mentioned previously, we are one of the sponsors of the Irish Internet Association's Congress, which takes place this year in Dublin's Croke Park.

Full details of the event may be found here

If you would like to avail of a 20% discount on booking simply use the coupon code: Congress2008

As we're sponsors of the event some of our staff should be around during the day, so keep an eye out for them!

Here at Blacknight we take our coffee very seriously.

I recently decided that we needed to get a slightly beefier coffee machine. The one we had been using for the last few months was fine, but it was time to upgrade.

Since I'm half Italian and have always had a certain fixation with good quality coffee it was only natural that I'd look at Gaggia and similar marques.

The machine I opted for in the end is a Gaggia Syncrony which takes beans or ground coffee.

Since we recently imported about 20 kg of fairtrade coffee beans our small little coffee grinder was under a lot of pressure, so a machine that did its own grinding solved two problems:
- ease of use
- dosage

One of the things that's really nice about the new machine is that you can re-program it so that the dosage of coffee and water is exactly the way you want it.

So expect to have very hyper Blacknight people answering phones over the next few days!