Well it's that Easter thing again.

Friday isn't a "real" holiday, so our offices are open pretty much all day today. Monday is a bank holiday in most EU countries, so we'll be operating on reduced staff numbers.

But Tuesday we're back in force.

So what's with the image?

Well I was looking for something to do with the entire Easter / Spring theme.

I did find plenty of "cute" pictures of chicks, ducklings and babies, but I didn't like them too much. What I was thinking of was something else. Something that also incorporated our new plans which we intend to launch next week!

So what's happening next week exactly?

We plan on unveiling a new range of hosting solutions that are going to change your life, cure world hunger and show you how super duper reliable and wonderful we are.

(Of course if you believe any of that you are truly gullible. Please email me directly and I'll help you buy loads of hosting that you don't really need. Thanks!)

Today and over the weekend several or our little elves will be beavering away on refining and tweaking everything so that it won't explode when we put it "live".

Of course you'd have to be insane not to expect there to be issues and problems. There always are. You can test stuff umpteen times, but someone will always find a new way to break it.

Speaking of stuff breaking ....

While we do offer excellent network uptime (see how we're curing the world's ails above) we do have issues from time to time. With that in mind we have been planning on moving our technical notifications to a separate offsite blog.

It's still a little rough around the edges, but I would encourage people to check out our new technical blog: Blacknight Status

The new site is running our favourite CMS - MovableType 4 and will be used primarily by our technical support and engineering teams to keep you up to date on any service affecting issues on our network.

What you are likely to find on there is:

• Service notifications
• Planned maintenance updates
• Technical Topics

What you are NOT likely to see:

• Marketing Stuff


• General Stuff

I'd recommend you subscribe to the blog as soon as possible

So .. Have a good weekend and keep an eye on your inbox. You never know what might be winging its way to you

Posted by Michele Neylon at 11:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

If you're not an existing Blacknight client this post isn't going to be that interesting or relevant to you, so you might want to move along...

The short version of this post:

We'll be emailing you to get you to choose a new username for the new control panel and billing system. The email will be clearly identified as coming from us and we won't be asking you for any sensitive information (ie. it won't be a phish!)

And for those with more patience ...

As some of you know we are currently working on a new shiny hosting system which is going to make your lives better and cure the world's ills (marketing speak gone mad! I know!).

If you can get past the marketing blurb one important fact remains. We will be moving away from Modernbill before too long. While it has served us well over the last few years our relationship has had its ups and downs, so now it only seems fair that we part our ways.

Now we know that migrating people to new systems can be disruptive and we also know how annoying it is when you're forced to use an insanely complicated username and password pair.

So our little elves (forgive the terrible metaphors!) have devised simple solution.

If you are an existing client of ours you will be getting an email at some point in the next few weeks. Within that email will be the basic details you need to choose your new username for the new billing system. It will all be quite painless we hope (and pray!).

In any case if you have any questions do let us know.

When is this going to happen?

I can't give a fixed date just yet, as we're still ironing out some issues and I hate making promises that I can't deliver on.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The expression "it never rains but it pours" springs to mind today ....

Earlier today we had a serious network issue and as soon as that was resolved we discovered a glitch in our online credit card processing.

I'm not a programmer, so I won't even pretend to understand exactly what happened, but I do know what the consequences were - no online CC processing for a few hours!

Fortunately our technical team were able to find the problem and fix it, so credit card processing is back in operation.

Sorry about the hiccups today !!

Posted by Michele Neylon at 4:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you're going to focus all your energies and money on developing your online presence then there are some really simple things that you need to get right.

If you were to rent a small shop in the centre of any town or city you would have to pay "top dollar", but if your main activity is centred around your website you don't need to worry about that particular expense.

However you do need to make some small investment in your actual online brand, as it's far too easy for someone else to grab it if you're not careful.

I'm always amazed at how little attention companies pay to basic online brand protection and, speaking from personal experience, it's an expensive lesson to learn after the fact!

When I first setup Blacknight I made a number of rather silly mistakes with our online branding. I didn't check that all the domains were available to register - hindsight's a wonderful thing, isn't it?

Acquiring domains when they've already been registered by someone else can be awkward if not impossible. And even if it's not awkward it can be expensive.

If you're going to start from scratch then you need to check if the name you've chosen fits some basic criteria:

• Is it short?


• Is it memorable?


• Can people spell it easily?

How many times have you heard an advert on the radio for some "cool" product or service and then not been able to find the company's website?

It's happened to me far too often. In some cases it's because the company name is odd and forgettable.
In other cases it's not clear how the domain name is spelt.

When it comes to registering the domain names a bit of common sense goes a long way. It's a hell of a lot cheaper to register a couple of extra domain names NOW than get into litigation about them later.

How much does a legal letter cost?
How much does a WIPO dispute cost?

If you compare those costs against the costs of registering a couple of extra domain names it's obvious which option to go for.

If you're an EU company I'd strongly urge you to get the following extensions:
com,net,org,info,biz,eu and co.uk
If your company is based in Ireland, then getting the .ie domain won't hurt!

Of course if you need to expand your brand into other markets in the EU then you probably need to get a few more extensions, but if you get the ones I mentioned now you'll save yourself a lot of headaches and MONEY !!

Posted by Michele Neylon at 1:00 PM | Permalink

We're a hosting company.

Like most hosting companies we have several hosting plans (products)

These plans have names.

Like everyone else the names we've been using are boring:

basic; standard; professional

I want to change them. I want something new. I want something that's a bit more imaginative, but I've no idea what!!!

Options on the table at present:
metals - silver, gold, platinum
grades - essential, premier, ultimate
arthurian - round table, holy grail (you get the general idea)
chess - pawn, rook, king

I'm open to suggestions. I'm open to anything at this stage!

Posted by Michele Neylon at 3:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (41)

There are several reasons why this blog exists and one of them is to get feedback from clients.

It may come as a surprise to people, but we actually do pay attention to what they say to us and about us.
I'd love to think that we do a good job all of the time, but there may be aspects of our service that fails to meet your expectations and if that's the case I'd like to know about it. (If you don't want to comment in public you can always email me directly: michele@blacknight.eu ). It might be something as simple as the way we worded our product or service offering ... If people don't let us know we have no way of knowing!

We are currently working on rolling out a new suite of websites and we will be unveiling a whole range of new products and services over the coming months. I'll be teasing you all with little details as we finalise the details, but now is also the ideal time for us to take your feedback. If you want us to offer something that is feasible then we might just do that. Of course we might think your idea is crazy ... but if you don't talk to us we will never know.

What kind of services would you like to see hosting providers like us providing in the future?

What elements of our current hosting plans would you like us to change? (I'm not saying we will change them, but I am more than willing to listen)

Which technologies would you like to see us offering in the future?

Posted by Michele Neylon at 12:56 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 4:49 PM | Permalink

We've re-enabled partial access to our billing system, so we can now take new orders.

If you want to pay an outstanding invoice please bear with us.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 12:05 PM | Permalink

Our billing and ordering system is currently offline so that we may conduct maintenace. We don't like doing this during office hours, but we've no choice.

Yesterday we made a mistake. I was informed that the mistake had been fixed and that it was all "ok".

It wasn't.

I'm not going to apologise again - I already did - instead we're taking it offline until it is fixed properly.

I don't like "fire fighting", but we've no option again this morning.

Please bear with us!

Posted by Michele Neylon at 9:34 AM | Permalink

As one of the sponsors of the IIA conference we are able to offer our clients a reduced rate on the tickets.

Simply email events@iia.ie quoting "Blacknight rate" for details

Posted by Michele Neylon at 3:06 PM | Permalink

The Irish Internet Association's Annual Congress is being held in Dublin on May 17th in the Fitzpatrick Hotel, Killiney.

This year's theme is "Buy, Sell and Do Business Online" and the event's organisers have been working on a great lineup from all the big names in the online industry.

Participants this year include Bebo, Google, eBay, Microsoft and Realex Payments.

We're sponsoring one of the afternoon sessions which will be focussed on monetisation - "Can you make money out of Blogs and Podcasts" . I'll post more details on the session closer to the date.

Further details of the event are available on the IIA's site

Posted by Michele Neylon at 2:55 PM | Permalink

One of the things that attracts people to the internet is possibly a hangover of the dotcom boom. People still believe that they can make their fortunes online without having to work hard.

While it may still be possible to make money online the days of not working hard, alas, are no more.

However that should not dissuade you!

We've mentioned selling custom tshirts via your website a couple of times in the past, as we partnered with SpreadShirt (watch this space for more partnership news!)

But what if you can't design?

There are plenty of other options open to you.

A couple of the more popular ones are Adsense and Text Link Ads.

Adsense is quite simple to use. All you need to do is sign up for an account and add some code to your website pages. When people click on the ads you earn money! Not that complicated, is it?

If you start using Adsense you'll soon find that there are thousands of websites and blogs dedicated to providing advice on how to make more money from it. There are even a couple of books on the subject!

Text Link Ads is slightly more complicated, but the rewards can be generous.

The basic concept is that text links ie. not graphic links, are valuable both in terms of traffic and seo, so you, as a website publisher, can make money from them.

The only downsides to TLA is that your site needs to be established and the system will not work with static HTML ie. you need to be using PHP, ASP or some other form of server-side scripting language to use the system.

If you're looking for tips and tricks on making money online you may want to check out the Irish Webmaster Forum, which is popular with Irish web professionals.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 9:40 AM | Permalink

Spreadshirt are offering all premium shop owners a really nice deal for the period of 13th December to 17th December:

"we want to surprise you and your customers with a little Christmas offer, and therefore have created a special coupon for you. It will be valid from the 13th to the 17th of December and will enable free shipping for all orders made in premium shops."

Every little helps!

In any case the code to give your clients is:
EGGNOG

In case you haven't already got a premium shop, then what are you waiting for?

If you sign up for a premium shop through us you will get all the advantages at zero cost for the first 6 months!!

See our previous post for details of this fantastic offer or simply click here to sign up immediately

Posted by Michele Neylon at 9:24 AM | Permalink