August 2008 Archives

• co.uk - general / business - no restriction and the most popular
  
• org.uk - non-profit - no restriction
• me.uk - individuals - no restriction
• ltd.uk - UK Limited Company - restricted - UK company details
• plc.uk - UK PLC - restricted
• net.uk - restricted - only open to UK ISPs
  
• sch.uk - restricted - only open to UK schools

We've added a couple of more Flash tutorials to the support section of our site.

The new tutorials cover using the control panel to manage DNS, change nameservers and use the autoinstaller (Application Vault) to setup applications like Wordpress or Movable Type.

You can now easily manage your domain's DNS settings including setting up both masked and unmasked forwarders via the control panel.

Any IE domain name registered via our new system is also fully manageable ie. you can update its nameservers without our intervention.

So if you suffer from insomnia you can update your nameservers in the middle of the night if you want to (bear in mind the IE Domain Registry does not reload every 5 minutes, so you won't gain much by doing that!).

We've been talking to a lot of our clients about the new control panel system over the past couple of weeks and the feedback you've been giving us has been really helpful.

Feel free to let us know what you think - we don't bite! Honest!

Is there some part of the control panel that you find confusing?

Why not let us know and we'll get a new tutorial done up for it.

We've upgraded this blog's backend and given it a new look (sort of)

If anyone notices anything odd please let us know, as we may have missed some silly little detail

We're going to be upgrading this blog's backend this evening, so the site may be unavailable for a period of time.

Hopefully (fingers crossed!) everything will be back working again shortly ...

Image via Wikipedia

If you are using Joomla please take the time to check the software version, as older versions are susceptible to a serious security issue

Users on our DirectAdmin servers may opt to use the upgrade system within Installatron, however we are urging ALL Joomla users to check their sites and upgrade ASAP.

One of the things that people really really hated about our old order system was the lack of a bulk order option for domains.

Our nice new shiny order system solves this issue once and for all!

You can now order up to 100 domains at once via our new bulk order system.

We're also adding support for more TLDs to the website order system. We don't want to play email ping pong with you anymore than you do!

Earlier today our developers were doing some housekeeping on IE domains.

What we were doing was updating some of the technical contact details to maintain some level of uniformity.

While this change had zero impact on the domains themselves and only affected the WHOIS data, the registry's system still sent multiple emails to registrants confirming the changes.

Unfortunately the wording of the emails may have been a bit confusing!

In any case, now you hopefully know what that was all about!

If anyone has any queries please feel free to contact us

Like a lot of people I have a todo list. It never seems to get any shorter, but today I managed to remove one item from my todo list - updating our "on hold" recording.

Liam Quigley is the voice you can hear while waiting to talk to any of our team:

Click here to download the mp3 file

A few weeks ago Krishna De and I spent an afternoon recording a series of short podcasts on hosting, domain registration, seo and related topics for the PodCamp Ireland series.

Krishna De has given me permission to use and abuse the hosting tip series, so I will probably make them available from here shortly (I'm still trying to find an embeddable mp3 player that I actually like!)

If people like this kind of thing it shouldn't be that hard to organise more of them....

We announced a while ago that multi year .ie registrations were going to be available soon. Wednesday last week this went live, you can now register an IE domain for upto 10 years. Currently we're allowing 1-5, and 10 years, we'll change this in a week or two once things settle down.

The second thing to announce is that you can now change the name servers of your newly purchased .ie domain names via our customer control panel (Playfully referred to as CCP by our support team) by clicking on "Billing" > "Domain Management" and then click on any .ie domain. One small niggly bug remains, for domains that are transferred into us from another reseller or the registry themselves can't yet be updated. This should be enabled in a week or so, it's a minor code fix on our end.

So to summarise, you can now register a .ie domain for upto 10 years and you can update the nameservers for your newly registered .ie domains via our CCP (without needing to ask us!).

More coming soon!

At times I get out of bed in the morning and I wonder why on earth I'm involved in this "game". Maybe I should have got into something else.

But what?

The last couple of weeks' rain has inspired me, as well as soaking me to the skin.

Add to that the flooding of some parts of Carlow town (only a few hundred metres from our offices on the banks of The Barrow) over the weekend and I may have hit on the solution!

We're going to branch out into selling watersports equipment.

We'll start with Scuba gear, as we're probably all going to have to swim to the office soon anyway.

I'm not sure if we should really go full out on this or not:

What do you think?

Maybe we'll just stick with hosting for the moment ....

Since first setting up this official company blog less than two and half years ago we've published 363 articles / posts.

However, there is no easy way for us to gauge if we are talking about the things that YOU want to hear about.

So what would you like us to post about?

Since we launched the new site, new control panel and new hosting plans recently I was thinking about doing some screencasts and tutorial type posts, but I'm not sure if people want that.

So please do let us know (post a comment below!)

Nominations are now open for the 1st Irish Web Awards

At the moment you need to be involved in a site in order to nominate it, but the organisers may change the criteria.

Damien Mulley has finally announced the launch of the 1st Irish Web Awards. Damien is also the driving force behind the Irish Blog Awards by the way.

Unlike so many of the other industry events that seem to gauge participation by the amount of money you are willing to spend, The Irish Web Awards are open to anyone and the sponsors are covering the costs (which makes sense!).

It will be interesting to see how much traction this new awards event is able to gain in both industry and elsewhere. At present there are several other award ceremonies being run every year, but each of them operates in a very different manner.

Disclosure: Blacknight host the sites for both the Irish Web Awards and The Irish Blog Awards

To celebrate the launch of our nice new shiny hosting platform we've slashed the price on domains by about 33%.

We were charging € 8.25 for a .com, whereas now we're charging a mere € 5.99.

And don't forget our fantastic price on IE domains - a mere 24.99 € !

When you combine that with the value of one of our generous hosting plans you get a deal that is truly hard to pass up!

Our new control panel makes managing your domains child's play.

I mentioned the Tuesday push recently in relation to pix.ie.

This week's Tuesday push is Toddle, which we also happen to host!

So what exactly is Toddle?

Toddle is the brainchild of SpoiltChild design. If you've seen our new site or any of our print ads etc., then you've seen their work.

In simplest terms it's a service to help you design your email newsletters.

You don't need to have any special skills to create an attractive email newsletter that you can send to your clients or prospects, as their intuitive interface does all the hard work for you.

Setting up an account takes less than 30 seconds and there are both paid and free options. I'd encourage you to play around with the free version first to see if it suits your taste / requirements.

Are we biased towards them?

Probably.

Do we feel guilty about this?

No.

Hopefully this'll be the first of many feature updates.

I'm delighted to inform you all that we're now supporting .net 3.5 on all our new Windows hosting plans.

That is, Minimus, Medius and Maximus (Windows Only plans) which you can view over on our website .

We've also got Ajax extensions 1.0 installed (we had this previously aswell on the old plans), both of these were supported in the last hotfix for our provisioning software.

Keep an eye out in future for more updates.

The IEDR, the people who look after the IE domain space, have announced the introduction of multiyear registrations of IE domains.

The change comes into effect at close of business Wednesday and will allow us to offer IE domains for periods up to 10 years, namely:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 10 year registration periods.

This change will not affect domain renewals or transfers, so if you already have a registered IE domain you cannot append years to its registration period at present.

The IEDR have said that they are looking into rectifying this at some point in the not too distant future.

Image via Wikipedia

While most people have been very positive about the new website and the new hosting plans there seems to be one area that is causing confusion.... logins.

Sorry about that!

If you placed an order for hosting or domain registration (apart from VPS) prior to Friday 8th August you can login here with your email address and password.

For all orders placed after Friday afternoon you should login here.

If you want to host a domain you already bought with us on the new shiny hosting system there is no issue. It's just a matter of updating DNS :)

And if you have any issues or queries please do let us know!

As I mentioned yesterday, we've just relaunched our website with a whole new set of hosting plans.

Over the coming weeks I'll be exploring some of the new options available to you and hopefully include a couple of screencasts as well (the stress is on "hopefully"!).

Our new entry level plan is called the "minimus", but there's nothing that small about it.

While it is "small" compared to our other hosting plans it comes with 20 times more space than its predecessor!

So what do you get?

To start with you get access to our new super-duper control panel. (You'll have to excuse all the superlatives - we're ever so slightly excited about this!)

The control panel is the "hub" for the entire system.

If you want to see what orders you have with us, be they domains, hosting accounts, vps or anything else, then you can login there and check their status.

To show you the kind of cool things you can do from within the control panel we asked our friends over in DemoDemo.com to put together some Flash tutorials for us.

If you have a look at some of the tutorials you'll probably get a "feel" for how things work.

What about other features?

The minimus, like all our hosting plans, allows you to host multiple websites on the one account.

You can now host up to 30 independent websites on a single hosting account.

If you want database support for a blog, forum, shop or anything else you will be blown away by the range of options available.

Not only are we offering you a choice of MySQL, PostGres and MS SQL 2005, we're also offering you the choice between MySQL 4 and MySQL 5, so if you need to move a site over from another provider you don't need to worry so much about database compatibility.

At the scripting level we're offering a choice of Php5 and Php4, though we would always recommend that you opt for php5.

If you want asp or asp.net there's no problem there, as we offer both Windows and Linux based web servers. You can simply choose which one you need during signup (we've got rid of the windows / linux plan pages since they just cause confusion).

What about pre-installed scripts?

We've a new application installer that offers a wide range of scripts and software for you to use with your site.

You can see it in action here

What about email?

We know how important email services are to our clients, so we've deployed a whole new range of email services and servers.

The "minimus" is not short on email features!

POP3 Mailboxes: Unlimited
Forwarders: Unlimited
Autoresponders: Unlimited
Mailing Lists: 5
IMAP
Email Filtering
Webmail: @Mail

If you want to access your email on the move then you'll love our new webmail service, which is powered by the very slick and powerful AtMail.

What about your site builder?

We've been offering clients a basic sitebuilder for quite some time and we were amazed at how popular it has proven.

We're now offering a much more powerful sitebuilder to our clients which comes with a nice range of templates to choose from.

What about ..... ?

There are a lot of new and cool features available for clients, so if you have any queries don't be shy! Let us know either by posting a comment here or simply emailing our sales team (sales@blacknight.com)

Image via Wikipedia

If DNS is not setup correctly your website(s) will not display, or if your ISP's DNS is having issues you won't be able to visit websites either.

Of course there are also nasty things that can happen if DNS is exploited.

If you want to be sure that your provider's dns is setup correctly then you can use a handy little tool provided by IANA.

You can read more about the tool and what it does on the ICANN site

If you've just gone to our website you may notice that it's changed. Not just a minor overhaul, but a full redesign (SpoiltChild) with CMS magic (2Bscene) and various other things integrated (Blacknight internal).

The new hosting plans offer:

• More space
• More bandwidth
• Single login
• More features
• More databases and database technologies

We will be migrating client billing accounts and domains into the new billing system as soon as we can (ie. over the next few weeks) but there is no magical way to move hosting from our old systems.

I'll be posting a bit over the next few days in more detail about the new plans and what we're doing that's different.

If you have any issues or simply want to give us feedback please do.

Just a quick reminder!

If you want to make your voice heard about how the IE namespace is managed now is the time.

The public consultation period closes this Friday at 5.30pm, so head on over to the ComReg site and let your voice be heard.

One of the downsides of a free market is that people can and will change their pricing.

Verisign will be upping the registry prices on both .com and .net on October 1st 2008, while .org will push theirs up on November 9th.

We'll be keeping an eye on how this pricing affects us and will let you know if we need to adjust our pricing accordingly.

This weekend is a bank holiday weekend here in Ireland and in many other countries across the globe.

While I wish the weather was as nice as in my fantasy photo (see above) unfortunately it's raining heavily here.

Our sales and accounts teams will be back in the office again on Tuesday morning.

Technical support will be available over the long weekend, as usual, via the helpdesk.

If you have a dedicated server or colocation / transit services, please refer to the "out of hours" support details. If you don't have them for any reason let us know.

Enjoy the long weekend!