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Blacknight Solutions, Ireland's leading internet services company, is proud to announce it is now the largest domain name registrar for .eu domain names in Ireland.


"A .eu domain name is a great way not just for Irish businesses, but all Europeans, to promote themselves throughout Europe and the wider world," said Michele Neylon, CEO of Blacknight Solutions. "Ireland is one of Europe's leading export economies, and Blacknight strongly encourage Europeans to register .eu domains as a great way to express European identity."


"With domain name registrations continuing to defy the global financial crisis, Blacknight is encouraging people thinking of registering a .eu domain name to not delay. Especially as it only costs €5.95 per year."


By registering a .eu domain name, it demonstrates your product or service's European identity. A .eu domain name assists in showcasing products and services to the 500 million Europeans in 27 European countries and out into the wider world.


There are almost three million .eu domain names registered by European businesses and individuals, with any company or organisation based in the European Union and any person living in the EU eligible to register a .eu domain name.


"By offering .eu domain names is part of being able to offer our clients a full range of domain name services, from registration to hosting, making Blacknight a one-stop shop for all a businesses' or individual's requirements."


Blacknight offers advice on domain name and webhosting requirements, with domain name registration services available for all major European countries and further afield throughout the world.


About Blacknight Solutions

Blacknight Internet Solutions Ltd is a 100% Irish-owned company specialising in serving the hosting and co-location needs of businesses, both large and small. Its servers are based in Ireland's leading datacenters: The Data Electronics Group in Clondalkin, Dublin and Interxion, also in Dublin. By partnering with innovative companies, like Parallels and Comodo, Blacknight brings best-of-breed technologies to the Irish market, while maintaining an aggressive pricing model. Blacknight are members of the IIA, ISPAI, RIPE, INEX and Nominet.  Blacknight are an ICANN accredited registrar. See www.blacknight.com for more information.

Milestones are great, especially when you least expect them.

Earlier today I logged into our Eurid account to check some figures and saw this:



We're now the largest Eurid accredited registrar in Ireland and climbing up the overall charts steadily (we've still got a long way to go globally!)

There are several "hot" topics in the domain world at the moment. The introduction of new gTLDs, which I have touched on, is one, while the introduction of IDN (internationalised domain names) is another.

For most of this site's readers IDN isn't that important.

Most of our clients, with some exceptions, are English speakers.

Of course the world is not an English speaking world, even if some people would like people to think it was.

So what exactly is this IDN stuff?

In simple terms IDN allows you to put non-ASCII characters into a domain. A very obvious example would be an accent. In the Irish language, for example, a lot of people's names and place names have accents, but at present you cannot register domains WITH the accent.

Of course accents are only the tip of the iceberg.

Imagine being able to register domain names in Cyrillic? Or place names in kanji?

So which TLDs support IDN?

That's a very good question!
There are mixed levels of support among the gTLD operators. There seems to be a higher level of "real" activity within the ccTLD world.
You can, however, peruse the resources on the Verisign site.

So which ccTLDs support IDN?

There's a list over on Wikipedia, though I'm not sure how accurate it is (wikipedia is very useful, but you can never be too sure how reliable the information is)

Eurid are talking about introducing IDN for the .eu namespace, but we can expect that to take at least another 12 to 18 months before there is anything for users. (See Stephane's recent post which is more optimistic)

IEDR like to say that they are ready to introduce IDN, but haven't made any move to do so even though they have been asked about it more than once in the past. (They're waiting on "a positive indication of market interest" whatever that is)

Nominet on the other hand has devoted time and resources to IDN


Whether IDN will become widely available in 2009 or 2019 is moot. It's on the way and when it gets here it will open up a whole range of exciting opportunties for people whose language is not English

Of course it also opens up a whole range of new problems as well, but doesn't everything?

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When you talk to people who are outside the industry or only look in from time to time their vision of things is always quite different. A lot of people seem to think that the internet is dominated by adult content and porn, scammers, spam and fraud.

Of course it isn't, but maintaining some of those myths isn't that hard to do.

So it was interesting to read the final results from the do.asiaa launch.

If you recall the mess that was the .eu launch you'll also recall the number of disputes and problems that the launch caused (many of them are still ongoing!).

The team behind DotAsia were fortunate enough to have been able to learn from Eurid's mistakes. Whether that led to a better process or not is questionable, as many people, including IP holders, probably feel that the allocation of domains was a bit too random for their liking.

The top 3 sales during the .asia auctions were:

1. discover.asia (US$112,111)
2. sex.asia (US$ 83,334)
3. buy.asia (US$73,000).

Stephane from Indom brought this rather odd situation to my attention back in July.

Does this mean that Asians are more interested in making money than satisfying their baser needs? (No need to answer that!)

So if your business was thinking of expanding into the Asian market what would you do first?
 
I guess the obvious answer would be to grab a .asia domain as a starting point.
 
Of course Asia is a big place, so maybe you might want to focus on a particular market such as China or Hong Kong. The growth of the .cn (China) has been truly stunning, with it becoming the biggest ccTLD in a very short space of time (whether it can hold that position is, of course another matter).

The next few years could be very interesting!



 

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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!

ICANN's 32nd International public meeting opened in Paris yesterday morning.

There are several hot topics on the agenda and judging by the crowds of people at last night's welcome cocktail, attendance levels are good.

If you're interested in finding out more head over to the meeting's official site where you can find details of meetings, talks, presentations and more.

The areas that are bound to attract attention this week are quite diverse and encompass topics such as new TLDs, the launch of .tel (dottel), Whois (again!), registry failover, the registrar agreement and both IDNs and IPv6. (Can you say "acronym hell"??)

Of course no ICANN meeting would be complete without an equally busy social agenda and last night's welcome cocktail at La Defense (photo above) was no different. Wednesday's gala dinner is being held in yet another famous Parisian landmark (more on that Thursday I hope!)

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 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!

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.

Journalists call from time to time asking me to talk about various internet related topics. Most of the time the publications or shows are "general interest", so you can only talk about very general things.

Last night, however, was quite different, as I was one of the guests on "Domain Masters" which is broadcast and streamed weekly at 7pm EST (11pm in Ireland, midnight CET)

The show's host last night was my good friend Jothan Frakes who is one of the domain name industry's gurus.

Although I was very nervous (which probably showed!) we had a nice chat about Blacknight, domains and the internet industry.

If anyone wants to hear the show there should be an mp3 version available on the WebmasterRadio site at some time over the next couple of days.

UPDATE: The Mp3 from last night is now available on the site http://www.webmasterradio.fm/Internet-Marketing/Domain-Masters/Geo-Domain-Expo-and-BlackKnight.htm

UPDATE 2: Of course if I provided proper hyperlinks people might be actually able to use them!
So here you go: Show details including podcast

We're going to maintain the price of .eu registrations and transfers @ 5 euro for the foreseeable future ie. we've no intention of upping the price.

We are hoping that Eurid (the entity that is in charge of .eu namespace) will change some of its procedures and policies with regard to renewals, as the present regime does not benefit either registrars or registrants.

We've decided to extend the special offer on EU domains for the month of November.

You can register a .eu domain for a mere 5 euro!

Check out which dotEU domains are available by using our online search

We've dropped the price on .eu domains for the rest of this month to a mere 5 euro!

You can place your order online via our website and your .eu will be up and running in minutes.

We've been an accredited registrar for .eu domains for the last couple of months, although we hadn't put our accreditation fully live until this morning.

As a domain registrant you have certain rights. Unfortunately those rights can be abused by companies that don't believe in ethical business practices.

It would be nice and simple if the whois display were the same across all TLDs (ie. domain extensions), but they're not.

A basic right is for the domain to be registered to you and under your control.

That means that the domain details should show yours. For example a .ie domain registered to me shows:

status: Active
nserver: NS.BLACKNIGHTSOLUTIONS.COM
nserver: NS2.BLACKNIGHTSOLUTIONS.COM
source: IEDR

person: Michele Neylon
nic-hdl: ABG182-IEDR
source: IEDR

person: Blacknight.ie Hostmaster
nic-hdl: AAM456-IEDR
source: IEDR

(I'm only showing the contact parts)
The administrative contact for the domain is clearly listed as me, while the second contact (tech-c) shows Blacknight, as I obviously register my domains with my own company.

For some TLDs, such as .eu the command line whois will give out varying amounts of information and you may need to go to the web based whois server to get the full details.

In either case the registrant is listed somewhere, even if the public cannot see it easily.

If the registrant wants to move their domain between registrars that is their right.

Under ICANN rules registrars are obliged to provide the EPP codes to registrants in a timely fashion (bearing in mind that you cannot transfer newly registered .com's etc., between registrars immediately)

If they want to update their domain's nameservers then they should be able to do so.

Unfortunately this does not happen.

The reality is that a disproportionate number of companies are denying registrants basic rights.

In some cases they may be doing this by accident, but in other cases it is 100% deliberate.

There is no valid reason for your web designer or developer to put their details all over your domain. None.

If you have asked your designer / developer to register a domain for you and paid them for it then it should be registered to you (which is one of the reasons why .ie domains are attractive!).

Over the past couple of years I've seen some crazy things, including a particular "registrar" that registers ALL .co.uk domains to themselves regardless of who has requested the domain.

Another company warehoused hundreds of .eu domains "on behalf" of their clients ie. in the hope that the clients would want to register the domains at some point in the future. Of course it wasn't clear if they would be charged a premium for this "service".

If a provider won't update the DNS for a domain then there is something wrong somewhere.

(If they can't update it due to the DNS not being loaded that is the registrant or their provider's issue!)

There's no good reason to delay handing over an EPP key.

If a registrant wants their co.uk domain retagged simply do it.

Why make people suffer?

Eurid, which is the registry in charge of the .eu domain, contacted all their registrars, including us, earlier today to announce a major change to the way they handle DNS updates.

At present .eu DNS servers update 5 times a day.

From 12 on October 9th the DNS will move to dynamic updates ie. changes will be instant.

This also means that the time lapse between a registration or change will be a lot faster (bearing in mind the distributed nature of DNS etc.,)

The announcement text is below for reference purposes:

The switch to dynamic updates, announced earlier this year, will be taking place on Tuesday 9 October at 12:00PM Belgian time. At that moment, .eu DNS servers will cease to update 5 times a day and begin updating instantaneously in response to changes as they occur. Please be sure to inform your customers of the change as this will affect certain services (e.g. website and email) since domain names will become active as soon as they are registered. We also remind everyone that while it is currently possible to correct any mistakes you have unintentionally made before the next scheduled update takes place, any mistakes made after dynamic updates have been implemented will be effective immediately. Conversely, any unintentional mistakes can be corrected immediately as well.

Most of the main domain registries use a similar system, so there won't be any tangible impact on the way things work, apart from them working faster!

If anyone has any queries let us know

Over the next couple of months a new domain extension will go live - dot asia (.asia) which is aimed at representing the businesses and people of the Asia Pacific region.

We'll be providing information on the registration requirements over the next few days as well as pricing and timelines.

Why would you want to register a .asia domain?

If you are trademark holder then you should do so to protect your brand.

If you are not a trademark holder but are serious about doing business in the Asia Pacific region, then .asia is the domain for you.

I'll be posting more information on this new domain name in the coming days and weeks, so please keep an eye on this site!

I was interviewed recently for an article published by Warren News. We're republishing the article here with the permission of Warner Communications News:

Too Little Marketing Said Hurting Growth of .us and .eu

Country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) .us and .eu were launched to great expectations, but several
years on, some wonder whether they will ever achieve their potential. There are claims the .us name space is
not being managed or marketed effectively, and that .eu suffers from too little exposure and too much
"warehousing" by domain name speculators. Registries EURid and NeuStar said they're successful but acknowledge
that their domains could be more popular.
With the .us registry contract up for possible rebid by NTIA, .info registry Afilias and registrar Go-
Daddy teamed up as the Domain Name Alliance Registry to submit a quotation (WID Aug 1 p5). They criticized
NeuStar's management of .us, saying it lost ccTLD market share over the past two years and that only
one in five websites contains original content.
With somewhere around one million registrations, .eu ranks ninth of all country codes, behind the Netherlands,
China and Argentina, the alliance said. NeuStar allowed .us to lose ground in a rapidly expanding market, the
alliance said, "beaten by aggressive competitors" when it should be growing at least as fast as the market in general.
The .us namespace is subject to several policies and procedures unique to it, such as requiring registrants to
have a legitimate nexus with the U.S. and filtering out certain unacceptable words, Keith Drazek, NeuStar senior
manager, industry and government relations, told us. The restrictions tend to weed out many of the abusive registration
practices, such as spammers, who go to other TLDs, such as .info, inflating the size of their registration databases,
he said. That is one of many arguments for why .us has not grown as quickly as other domains, he said.
Drazek stressed that NeuStar supports the policies, which are crucial to maintaining the integrity of the space.
NeuStar, which also responded to NTIA's request for quotations, is committed to continuing its responsible
and aggressive promotion of .us, Drazek said. Among other things, the registry conducts marketing programs designed
to drive "quality" registrations with actual content, he said.

.eu a 'Wasteland'?
The ccTLD is working well but faces several challenges, a June 7 European Commission report to the European
Parliament and Council concluded. Among the challenges is to ensure promotion of more registrations as
well as actual use of .eu by citizens, institutions and companies, it wrote.
Despite the commission's glowing report, some observers say .eu is a no-go. In a July blog on CircleID,
an Internet policy discussion space, Blacknight Internet Solutions Managing Director Michele Neylon
asked if the EU namespace is dead.
Efforts by registry EURid to increase awareness of .eu as a brand are "a bit misplaced," Neylon said.
The domain name only works for native English speakers, who "are anything but the majority" in the EU, he
said. The ccTLD was created to serve European citizens and businesses, but many domains were snapped up
during the sunrise and landrush stages by speculators and "phantom" registrars created for the purpose of grabbing
names, Neylon said. The "fiasco" hurt Europeans' confidence in the namespace because so many names
were taken by dodgy companies on the other side of the globe, he said.
Even the strictest registration rules provide opportunities for mass domain-grabbing and cybersquatting, said
Dirk Krischenowski, founder of dotBERLIN, which aims to roll out city TLDs. Some say domain speculators are the
"salt in the soup" because they create and raise the hype on a new TLD, he said, but mass domain-buying can sour regular
Internet users who find "for sale" signs or monetizing websites at frequently typed terms such as hotel, he said.
The crucial part of marketing a domain is to get famous brands, celebrities and the Googles and Yahoos
to use them actively, said Krischenowski. The EU should also have reserved generic terms for its own use,
such tourism.eu or visit.eu, to help market its assets, he said.
The .eu ccTLD is a "wasteland with perhaps less than 16% of domains being actively developed as websites,"
Internet lawyer Bret Fausett blogged. The rest are holding, framed, pay-per-click or redirected pages, he
said. "Far from being the prominent European choice, it is now very much a third choice for most Europeans," he
said. Unless it finds a niche, it will stay at this level, if it's lucky, Fausett said.
.eu is "fundamentally unnecessary" for big companies, said intellectual property lawyer John Berryhill, who
represents domain name registrants in cybersquatting cases. "If I am Siemens, I already have Siemens.com, and
people can navigate to the language version they want," he said. Registering Siemens.eu adds nothing, he said, because
it's more sensible to have the national distribution organizations use the relevant ccTLD. A large corporation
will not hire a new team to build a .eu site from scratch, it will simply migrate content to it, Berryhill said.
"We have only been open for about 15 months and have 2.5 million registered domain names, being the
third largest ccTLD in Europe," EURid's spokesman told us. Some companies are actively using their .eu websites,
the number of domain name system database queries is 7.5 times higher than it was last year, the renewal rate is
"healthy" and around 2,000 domains are being added every day, he said.
It takes time for a new TLD to become a natural part of the domain name world, the EURid spokesman
said. Over time, the registry hopes to see more of .eu "out in the streets, on the back of buses," and in advertisements,
but companies as well as individual need time to adjust, he said.
The phantom registrars some complained of were not illegal, the EURid spokesman said. They were
registered and working under U.K. laws, and there were no provisions in the registry's regulation that allowed
it to limit the number of or exclude registrations by suspected associated companies, he said. However, victims
of the abuses could and still can seek to recover their names by filing alternative dispute resolution complaints
for abusive or speculative registrations, he said.
U.S. applicants are not eligible to register .eu domains, but .eu has U.S. registrars, the EURid spokesman
told us. In one major case, a huge number of limited liability companies were set up in the U.S. and became accredited
as registrars representing a few registrants in the EU to purchase a large number of names during the
ccTLD launch. Since registrars are by contract barred from warehousing names, EURid sued them in a Belgian
court, the spokesman said. The case is ongoing and its outcome uncertain, he said. The registry also revoked
around 6,000 domain names due to lack of eligibility, he said. --

Dugie Standeford

This article orginally appeared in WASHINGTON INTERNET DAILY MONDAY, AUGUST 6, 2007

A lot of people signup for hosting using free email accounts or maybe their "current" work email address.

Unfortunately nobody on our end can possibly know if those email addresses are valid weeks, months or years later.

If you change your email address or telephone number you can easily update it via the control panel, or contact our accounts team and get them to do it for you.

If you don't keep the details up to date you may miss important emails from us about your hosting account, your domain renewal or even the chance to get something for nothing :)

Seriously, though, it is important that people keep their contact details up to date.

If you change jobs or stop using your free email account you do run a very serious risk of missing an important email from your hosting provider, registrar or ISP.

Take the time to check that the details on your .com domains are correct, especially if you have transferred them from another provider.

Under ICANN rules the WHOIS data has to be accurate at all times.

With other registries, such as Eurid, only a very small amount of personal data is viewable to the public via standard whois. It is very hard to spam the contacts on a .eu domain, for example, so please do not let a fear of spam lead to you losing out on a domain's renewal.

EURid accredited Irish domain registration and hosting company Blacknight Solutions as an EU registrar. Blacknight Solutions is one of Ireland's largest hosters with over 18 thousand domains hosted.

"Becoming an accredited .eu registrar allows us to offer the best level of service to our clients", explained Blacknight's CEO Michele Neylon.

"Being a .eu registrar benefits our clients because Blacknight Solutions can register .eu domains faster and more efficiently. It also allows us to deal directly with EURid."

A .eu domain is essential for businesses operating in the EU and allows the market to be served with a single domain.

Since the launch of .eu in April 2006 over 2 million names have been registered.