January 2010 Archives

We've just posted a new job vacancy (or vacancies) here.

This time round we're looking for multilingual customer service / technical support staff.

Let's see how we do with CVs ..

Further details and how to apply here

NO AGENCIES OF ANY KIND

We'll be attending the upcoming DomainPulse event in Lucerne, Switzerland.

DomainPulse is the most important event for the German speaking domain industry, and is held each year in either Germany, Austria or Switzerland.

This year's agenda includes topics such as IDNs, DNSSEC, legal issues and internet governance.

It's also one of the few domain industry events that doesn't seem to have new TLDs on the agenda, so that's probably as good a reason as any to attend! (Only kidding!)

Special offers and discounts can be fun! If you subscribe to our newsletter you can get subscriber only discounts that we don't offer anywhere else!

In order to celebrate Friday, which seemed like a stupid enough reason to have a discount,  we've put together a couple of special discounts for you.

Use the coupon code: fridayfeeling
(coupon expires at midnight tonight Irish time (UTC) )

When ordering via our site you will get the following prices:

.net 1 year registration €4.99
.biz 1 year registration €2.99
.info 1 year registration €2.99
.mobi 1 year registration €4.99
.eu 1 year registration €1.99
.me 1 year registration €9.99
.be 1 year registration €0.99
.co.za 1 year registration €9.99

We're also trying to raise some money for a good cause. Check out our blog post here

Keep an eye on our Twitter and Facebook accounts for other silly offers

The tragedy that struck Haiti a few days ago has shocked the world.

So we've decided to try and raise some cash for what we consider to be a worthy charity - Médecins Sans Frontières.

We've setup a donation site which uses the mycharity.ie system, so the funds go to the charity we've chosen - NOT us.

The target we've set is currently €10000 (ten thousand euro) and we've added a little twist. We've thrown €1000 into the pot to start things going.

For every €5000 raised we'll release a €5 discount on IE domain registrations - so if you can help us reach our target we'll be slicing €10 of the cost of registration. And, if you're all really generous, we'll end up giving away IE domains for a purely nominal fee..


So what are you waiting for? Get donating!

About the Charity:


Médecins Sans Frontières is an international organisation that helps provide emergency medical assistance to people in over 70 countries worldwide.

You can find out more about the organisation from either their international site or the Irish one.

ICANN announced on Friday evening that we, Blacknight, had been chosen to receive the bulk transfer of all domains on the Hosting 365 Inc ICANN accreditation (IANA ID: 956).

This bulk transfer is a result of Hosting365 Inc  losing their ICANN accreditation on January 4th 2010 due to a compliance action taken by ICANN  (PDF)

We have setup a dedicated page on our site which addresses most of the common questions, but to summarise:

- all domains on the Hosting365 Inc accreditation have been transferred to us
- if your domain was one of those affected you should receive login details from us
- we have already attempted to contact all affected registrants to inform them of the change in registrar
- you can check if we are the registrar of record for any domain using WHOIS (our whois server will only show domains that are on our accreditation)
- nameserver records will not have been affected by the change in registrar
- domain renewal dates remain unchanged

If you have any queries related to this announcement please let us know.

While we realise that this sort of change may be traumatic for some registrants we intend to make the transition as painless as possible and look forward to doing business with the affected registrants.

It's a new year, so we're rejigging some of our service offerings. We're also giving a nice discount, but you'll have to read more about our hosted email service to get it ..

And besides, any excuse to use photos of cute kittens is always welcome, isn't it?

So our Hosted Exchange plans have now got even better!

We've doubled the disk space AND we've reduced the price.

We're offering Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, so you get all sorts of cool features for your outsourced email including:

• global address book
  
• shared calendar
• public folders
• ActiveSync

And all Hosted Exchange Email plans come with:

• IMAP4 / POP3
• Spam Filtering
• Virus Filtering

Not sure which plan is right for you? Check out our Hosted Exchange Email comparison chart.

From now until the end of January 2010 use the coupon code:

email0110

and you'll get 30% off your first month of Hosted Exchange Email. (Coupon is only valid on monthly accounts)

While everyone else is settling back into a New Year it's "nice" to see that the scammers have been hard at work.

So what's on the menu this year?

Well there's Internet Register Ireland. Remember them?

There's also those "lovely" people from Domain Registry of America. They got a nice slap on the wrists in the UK recently, so maybe someone could report them to the Irish advertising standards authority?

If you get letters from either of these organisations please bin them. If you wish to lodge a complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority it may help raise awareness.

Just so it's clear.

We do not send out hard copy renewal notifications or letters to our clients. If we ever send anything out in the mail it will be very clear that it is from us, as our paper is very heavily branded!

Another one to watch out for is domain name resellers charging a "release" or "unlock" fee for domain names. If this has happened to you we'd love to hear about it!

Several of our clients have received emails from eNom in the last 24 hours about supposed WHOIS compliance issues:

From: whoiscompliance@enom.com [mailto:whoiscompliance@enom.com]
Sent: 06 January 2010 00:03
To: info@xxxxxxxx.com
Subject: Whois Day 60 / Freeze Notification Letter - Immediate action required for domain xxxxxxx.com


Dear xxxx xxxx,

As your registrar of record, eNom, Inc requests your immediate attention regarding your domain, xxxxxxxx.com.

eNom, Inc, as a US-based company, must comply with US laws.
These laws prohibit us from providing services to Cuba, Iran, and Sudan ("Sanctioned Countries").

Based on the information available to us, some or all of the "whois" contact information for
your Domain is within a Sanctioned Country. As you may know, the "whois" contact information
for a domain includes the billing contact information, the registrant contact information,
the administrative contact information, the technical contact information, and, if applicable,
the auxiliary billing contact information for the domain.

Therefore, we have concluded that your Domain may be controlled by a person located in a Sanctioned Country.

Effective immediately you are no longer permitted to perform financial transactions for your Domain.
Features such as registration renewal and auto-renew have been disabled until you update your contact information.


Kind regards,

eNom Compliance

Email address: whoiscompliance@enom.com

Unfortunately the email is not a scam.

If you have got one of these emails please contact support@blacknight.com as soon as you can and we will assist you.

Although we are an ICANN accredited registrar, a lot of domains that we manage for clients are managed through another registrar, eNom.

We intend to move those domains to our own accreditation as soon as possible in order to avoid future issues.

We are currently checking ALL domains on our account with eNom to ensure that the country code is set correctly.

We believe, however, that this issue is due in part to a technical error.

Ireland when converted to the ISO code is normally presented as "IE" or "ie".
We suspect that at some point in the past some  domains' whois was converted from "Ireland" to "IR", which is the country code for Iran.

As most people are probably aware, Europe is currently experiencing some pretty nasty weather.

Ireland, where we are based, has been having severe frost, ice and snow since the week before Christmas.

Unfortunately the local authorities haven't been able to treat the roads, so they are becoming more and more unsafe. (I think someone referred to the main road as being worse than an ice rink .. )

As result of this and in the interest of our staff's wellbeing, we will not be operating from our offices until further notice and so our phonelines will probably be closed for most of the day. Some of our staff are able to access the phone system remotely, but not all.

Our staff will be dealing with queries via email and Live Chat as normal.

Here are the contact points you may use:

For technical support queries use: support@blacknight.com

For questions related to billing / invoices use: accounts@blacknight.com

For queries related to domain names or buying products and services from us, please use: sales@blacknight.com

UPDATE:

The road conditions in Carlow / Kilkenny are, for lack of a better word, terrible. AA RoadWatch are reporting many roads to be either dangerous or impassible

I'm fascinated by statistics. Of course being fascinated by them is one thing, being able to do anything meaningful with them is quite another matter entirely.

So here are a few statistics that I thought I'd share.

Facebook provides quite a bit of data to publishers of pages, so here's some of ours.

(Bear in mind that our page has got less than 700 "fans" at the moment)

Our "fans" are predominately male (73%) and the bulk of them are based in Ireland (over 400 of the current 680 odd).

Of the Irish "fans", the bulk of them appear to be in Dublin, though it's not very clear if the location is based on something that people are setting in their profile, or if it's based on their IP address. I suspect it might be based on the IP address, though if anyone can clarify this it would be interesting.

What else does Facebook tell us?

The bulk or our "fans" appear to be in the 18 to 44 age bracket, which isn't that surprising considering our line of business.

So what about Twitter?

We've been using Twitter for well over a year now.

When I last did a review of our stats we only had about 350 "followers".

One year later that number has grown to nearly 3 thousand! (Graph via TwitterCounter)

We "tweet" 7 days a week, though we're not total insomniacs (graphs via Tweetstats):

What do we tweet about? Follow us to find out!

Some other stats...

According to Google Analytics ...

50% of people visiting our site use Firefox, while 33% use Internet Explorer and just under 9% use Safari. Although Google's Chrome browser is the "new kid on the block", it's already being used by over 5.5% of visitors to our site.

Nearly 80% of people accessing our site use some form of Microsoft Windows, while over 15.5% use Mac. Only 3.5% use Linux.

The bulk of people visiting our site use relatively high resolution settings on their monitors, so we may need to rethink our site's layout the next time we give it a facelift. We probably ought to be doing more with iPhone and mobile users, though admittedly both have been on our "todo list" for quite some time.. ..

According to Alexa our site is the 90th most popular website in Ireland, which is amusing, though probably not that accurate.

Of course statistics are just numbers. It's what you do with them that matters!

Tomorrow morning most people will go back to work if they haven't done so already.

Our offices will resume their normal operating hours and the IE Domain Registry will re-open.

Prior to the Christmas break we ran a rather attractive offer on IE domain names.

Unfortunately due to the sheer volume of domains and the short timeframe before the Christmas break there are still several hundred registration and transfer requests pending.

If you ordered a .ie domain name registration OR transfer prior to Christmas please bear with us.

All orders will be processed, however it may take a couple of days for our sales team to deal with all queries.

If you are transferring a .ie domain name to us please ensure that you have submitted the signed transfer authorisation.

You can submit the transfer authorisation in one of three ways:

• Upload a scan using the link in the email we sent you
• Via fax to +353 (0) 1 4811 763
• As an attachment via email to sales@blacknight.com (Preferably JPEG)

If you are registering a .ie domain name and need to submit supporting documentation you can use the same methods.

If you have any queries please let us know.