Blacknight Blog - Hosting - Domains: Marketing Archives

More Cool Foam Stuff

By Michele Neylon on July 2, 2009 11:18 AM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks

The guys in MadeInHollywood have come up with yet another cool concept.

Remember when we had a few Microsoft mugs to give away? Well one of the problems we ran into was that the mugs weren't packed ie. no boxes or anything, so shipping them was a problem.

MadeInHollywood came up with a pretty cool solution that does two things:

Protects the mug
Promotes our brand

I've taken several photos of the packages which are now on Flickr, but here's a couple to whet your appetite:

Pretty cool concept !

Beware of Google Scams

By Michele Neylon on May 23, 2009 2:21 PM | 2 Comments | No TrackBacks

Several of our clients have been in touch with us recently regarding yet another scam.

At least one company is targetting small businesses offering them "guaranteed first page position on Google".

To make matters worse they're also claiming to have a special relationship with Google.

Now don't get me wrong, there are plenty of reputable companies offering both search engine optimisation and search engine marketing services. However, it's when a company offers these kind of silly guarantees that I get rather annoyed.

Getting your site onto the front page of Google for certain keywords and phrases is possible, but it takes a lot of work, unless your niche is incredibly small and uncompetitive.

If you get an offer that sounds simply "too good to be true", then it probably is.

Sales people will always try to tell you that their product or service is amazing - it's what they're paid to do. Don't just take their word for it. Ask around.

If nobody has heard of them chances are they aren't as "wonderful" as they might like you to believe.

Some More Press Coverage This Weekend

By Michele Neylon on May 5, 2009 12:14 PM | No Comments

This weekend's edition of Computers in Business, which is the IT supplement for the Irish Sunday newspaper, The Sunday Business Post, featured us a couple of times. I was also quoted in Saturday's Independent.

Unfortunately neither the article on LinkedIn or the one on domains is available online. As I wrote the LinkedIn article I will probably publish it on my personal site later today...

Calling All Graphic Designers - Win A Wacom Tablet

By Michele Neylon on March 16, 2009 12:13 PM | 15 Comments | 1 TrackBack

We've run competitions in the past.

With most of them the prize was either a hosting plan or a domain or maybe even both.

We haven't given away non-hosting prizes in quite some time, apart from the hoodies a few weeks ago, so we thought it was about time that we did.

So this time round we're giving away a Wacom graphics tablet.

Sounds good, doesn't it?

So what's the catch?

Well the catch is that we're throwing down the gauntlet to the designers and creative types out there. We currently have some tshirts and hoodies over on Spreadshirt, however we're looking for something new and interesting. The domainer tshirts over here are more fun than the current set we have and if you like online tshirt shops I'm sure you'll have seen plenty of funky tshirts.

We want a design that reflects us, that people will want to wear and that people will actually like.

NB: As we will be using the design for tshirts and other promotional gear the designer must assign us all rights on the chosen winning design

If anyone has any questions or queries about the competition please feel free to ask.

We'll run the competition for the next two weeks.

UPDATE March 30th 2009: We're extending the deadline by a further week

Show Us Some Loving

By Michele Neylon on February 25, 2009 11:13 AM

One of our clients was asking me yesterday if we had any "hosted by" or "hosting powered by" type images that they could use on their site.

We do, but for some stupid reason they aren't on our website at the moment..

I'll see if I can rectify that, but in the meantime here are a selection of images that people can use to show us some "link love":

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If you want us to link back to you on this page just let us know

If you use any of the images when linking back to us please please please link to www.blacknight.com (and not our .ie or .eu)

NB: Please download a copy of the image and upload to your own site.
Please do not "hotlink" to the images here, as we may block hotlinking entirely due to some "charmers" who keep using the stock images on their own sites (without paying for them!)

Minor update: Before anyone asks... All images were done by SpoiltChild Design

What Can You Do With A Horse's Head?

By Michele Neylon on February 6, 2009 3:33 PM | 65 Comments

Our logo is a horse's head. You'll see it in various formats on all our websites, business cards, headed paper, adverts and everthing else..

Now we've been sent not one, not two but four horse's heads in our logo's style, but made of polystyrene foam (big thanks to MadeInHollywood)

Now let's be honest, they are cool. You can say what you like, but they are fun objects.

The problem is now that I've got four horse's heads sitting in my office I honestly don't know what to do with them:

So here's what we'll do....

We're inviting you to make suggestions on what we can do with them via the comments here and we'll give something "nice and shiny" to the winner.

Hosted Exchange Email Now Available

By Michele Neylon on January 29, 2009 3:40 PM | 5 Comments

Today we are happy to announce our new Hosted Exchange range of services.

Our technical team have been working on putting together a really nice Hosted Exchange Product that will fit the needs of business users.

Why worry about patching and maintaining an office mail server, when you can let our team worry about it for you?

Want your email on the move?

How about getting email directly on your phone? (It works really well with any smartphones we've tried and the iPhone integration is really sweet!)

So what we're launching today will meet that requirement with a variety of plans (and addons) to fit business needs from as little as 8.95 a month!

I've been playing around with it for the last few days on both my Macbook (using Entourage) and on my phone, using both MFE and RoadSync and it works really nicely!

I hate using terms like "mission critical", "enterprise" and all that, but the infrastructure we've put in place for Hosted Exchange mail ticks a lot of those boxes!

All our Exchange 2007 plans come with some really cool features:

FREE anti-virus and anti-spam via Microsoft Forefront
Continuous backup - data is backed up every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year (that's ~~1440~~ 96 times a day!)
Outlook web access
IMAP4
POP3

Depending on the Hosted Exchange plan you choose, you can also get lots of extra "goodies" that can help you and your team regardless of their location: