Recently in business Category

We are delighted to be able to tell the world that we are now an ICANN accredited registrar!

I've been attending ICANN events and trying to get to grips with the entire setup for the last couple of years and quickly realised that the only way we could really move forward was to become accredited. We're already accredited with a lot of the ccTLD operators, such as Nominet, AFNIC, Eurid and several others, so getting rid of the middleman for our gTLD domains made sense.

With our own accreditation we'd be able to interact directly with the registry operators and with the wider ICANN and internet community.

I also realised that since the entire RegisterFly debacle  "buying a registrar" was possible, but it would have been a really really bad idea.

So instead of opting for the easy "off the shelf" solution we went through the entire accreditation process from start to finish, so we got it on our own merits, making us the first Irish company to have ever done so.

The accreditation process can be quite confusing, but luckily several good friends and colleagues were able to help clarify various parts of it along the way:

• Jothan Frakes - he's like a walking talking domain encyclopedia (currently working on new gTLDs over here)
  
• Frank Michlick - he's done a lot of this stuff so many times before
• Mark Klein - he's a cool guy and really helpful
• Steve Gobin and Tim Cole - both incredibly helpful and patient 

While we aren't setup to use our accreditation yet with any of the domain registries we will be soon enough (I'm not sure how long that's going to take, but I know that I will have to deal with a LOT of paperwork in the coming weeks!)

We can, however, use the ICANN logo!

As we go through the process of getting the accreditation with the individual domain registry operators (Verisign, Afilias, PIR, dotMobi, Telnic etc.,) I'll try to keep people up to date on our progress.

You can see a full list of the current accredited registrars on the IANA site as well

The finalists for the Irish Blog Awards were published last night and we made it into the final list!

This blog is a finalist in the business blog category along with:
Brightspark, Sabrina Dent, Curious Wines and Nice Day Designs.

Best of luck to everyone!

We finally got the new shared hosting offering ready for public consumption in in August - not quite a year overdue, but not far off it!

One of the things we have learnt over the past few years is that no matter how well prepared you might be things can and will go wrong. The delays with launching the new products and services caused us a lot of heartache and pain, as we'd been hoping to launch them a lot sooner. I don't like going back on my word, but if it's not ready, it's not ready. What can you do?

We also launched an offsite blog for our technical announcements ie. when stuff breaks or when we're planning on breaking it (I mean upgrading it *cough*). The offsite blog is completely independent of our network and doesn't even use our nameservers, so as long as our staff can get net access they can post updates to it.

To help people keep track of what we're up to we also got a presence on both Facebook and Twitter. We'll be pushing out more of our promotions and special offers via those channels in the coming months - so watch that space!

What else have we been up to?

On the staff side of things we expanded even more, with some new faces joining the team, while some others moved on to other things.

Our planned office expansion / remodelling project is on the backburner again, but at least we're in the fortunate position of having the extra space in the building when we need it.

It's been an interesting year in the hosting and internet business globally, with a lot of acquisitions and mergers. New technologies are proving popular, while some of the companies that have been around for years now face uncertain futures (think Yahoo!).

With that in mind I travelled to both DomainFest in LA and the ICANN meeting in Paris. The DomainFest event was great fun, but also a wonderful opportunity to see what people are up to in other countries. The same is true of ICANN meetings - I always come away with new contacts and ideas (we won't talk about how sane the ideas are!).

2009 is going to be an interesting year for us, as we push out some new stuff for our clients to enjoy.

Let's hope it's as good (overall) as 2008 has been!

After all the doom and gloom of the last few months we all need to look towards 2009 with a positive aspect.

Nobody can know for sure what 2009 will hold for any of us.

One thing, however, is sure, it's going to be anything but boring!

Businesses both large and small are going to have to make changes and watch how and where they spend money.

In many respects this should, in theory at least, lead to more efficient businesses, though there will also be quite a few businesses that will end up losing out.

I guess for some people this economic downturn is probably their first experience of an economic slump. For those of us over 30 it isn't.

We can all remember the 80's and early 90's when the Irish economy was dire and unemployment was a fact of life. I remember the queues in the dole office in Cobh being so long that they literally went round the corner from the post office!

But there's no point being negative about it.

Economies rise and fall. It's cyclical.

You can have an economic boom, but you can't expect it to last forever.

Hopefully we'll all be able to make it through the current downturn without too much difficulty, but it's not going to be easy. People will lose jobs, other people will have to learn to live on lower salaries.

In our sector I expect some of our clients and partners are going to feel the pinch and cutback, while others will expand.

Online businesses that have a solid revenue model should be able to "weather the storm", while those that have been basing themselves on a "fluffy" model probably won't.

People are going to shop around more and more for the best deal, be that for insurance, food, drink or any other product or service that they need to consume. I know that we've been forced to re-assess a lot of our costs over the last few months and while we don't cut corners, we have made changes to how we buy certain products and services so that we can get the best value.

So how will 2009 pan out for us all?

It's impossible to say, but, as I said earlier, we have to be positive about it. If everyone spends all their time and energy focussing on the negative aspects then nobody will make any progress.

We've got a lot of cool projects in the pipeline for 2009 that will bring new services to our clients without "breaking the bank".

We will try to maintain low prices on as many products and services as we can.

We will endeavour to improve the level of service and value that we provide to our clients in the coming year, as we feel strongly that a good level of service is something that everyone deserves.

So to all our clients, friends, partners and suppliers - here's hoping that we all have a great 2009 and that we can avoid the doom and gloom!

The clock is ticking....

With Christmas only a couple of days away we'd just like to give people a gentle reminder - if you want to register any new IE domains or make any changes the IE Domain Registry will be closed from Tuesday, so you should really do it before then!

I've already posted our opening hours for the break.


As for the puppy?

Well my dog owning staff were complaining, so I had to do something to appease them..

If you've ordered any IE domains from us recently or are planning on doing so this post is for you!

Since the IE Domain Registry requires specific documentation for each and every IE domain that you want to register we spend a lot of our time playing "email ping pong" with both you, our clients, and the registry staff.

One of the biggest frustrations with this is that unfortunately a lot of people forget to send us the documents and they can end up "losing" their chance to register a domain.

That results in frustration / anger / annoyance / disappointment all round.

It's not nice - but it happens.

We've been tweaking stuff on our end over the last year to try to ensure that it happens a lot less...

As of yesterday afternoon we've made a small, but significant, addition to our domain registration backend system.

We've finally turned on the "nag" system.

Basically what will happen is that every working day at around 9am our backend system (think computers, servers, lots of 1's and 0's) will send you an email to remind you to provide the documentation.

As soon as the domain is fully registered these reminder (nag) emails will stop.

Now I know that some people are going to find these emails really really annoying.

I am sorry, but you'd be even more annoyed with us if your really "cool" name was registered by a competitor, wouldn't you?

And if you're not sure which documents you need to give us, then let our sales staff know - they'll always try their best to assist you.

One of the wonderful things about our line of business is that so many of our clients are happy to share their experiences with us in public. A lot of them send us emails, blog about us, twitter or post on forums and mailing lists.

Of course not all of their comments and feedback are going to be positive, but if we listen to what they are saying we may be in a position to capitalise on the feedback.

While we can't work miracles many of the issues people encounter while interacting with us can be easily rectified. It can be a simple matter of changing the wording in an email slightly or moving a link.

Unfortunately there will always be things that we cannot change or where we have to take the feedback, accept that is valid, but still aren't in a position to do anything about it in the short term.

In some cases it's simply because the technology or process is beyond our control (think EPP keys for domains). Other times it's because we made a decision to do things in a particular way and the underlying reasons for this may not be accepted by all our clients as readily as we might like (not allowing ssh access to our new hosting platform for example).

It's really encouraging to read people talking about their positive experiences and what they've learnt along the way.

Hugh, for example, did an interesting post yesterday on how upgrading his VPS led to an improve not only in his site's responsiveness, but also in its Google ranking. It's the kind of story that great case studies are made of.

We didn't ask Hugh to write about his experiences and he's not always going to say 100% positive things about us. His feedback is genuine.

Dealing with really negative feedback is awkward at the best of times.

Over the past few years we, as a company, have changed quite a bit.

When I came back to Ireland from Milan in 2003 there were 1.5 people working for the company. Five years later we have 16 fulltime staff in our offices and several contractors working for us on a fairly regular basis.

We've gone from having so few servers that I could actually count them, to a number that I don't even want to look at.

With the changes have come many improvements. We're offering a lot more services and at a lower price than previously, but in order to do that we have had to remove some of the "personal touch" and to standardise a lot of things. When you have to deal with some of the backlash that comes with these changes it can be quite traumatising. Business is business, but it's hard not be personally invested in your own company. I can feel great pride in the kind words, but I will, naturally, take the negative as closely to heart.

So how can you deal with these changes?

I honestly don't know the answer!

What I have found helpful, however, is some of the lessons in "Crossing the Chasm". Ross Cooney suggested I grab a copy a few years ago and it has helped make sense of some of the chaos!

It still won't make dealing with the extremely irate clients any easier of course, but I'm not 100% sure if anything truly can. What it has taught me, however, is that not all customers are going to have the same expectations and that we need to learn how to deal with the different ones as best we can.

While it would be lovely to be able to please everyone it simply isn't possible.
Take the negative feedback onboard.
Don't ignore it.
Maybe you can change something for the better.
Maybe you can take a customer's bad experience and put it to good use.
Maybe you can't.
Try to keep an open mind.

Just don't stick your head in the sand.