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A couple of months ago we got a nice shiny object from Microsoft, so now I'm delighted to say we got its "big brother".

Blacknight is now officially a Microsoft Gold Partner!

"Gold Certified Partners represent the highest level of competence and expertise with Microsoft technologies and have the closest working relationship with Microsoft."

That's pretty cool!

We've been working closely with Microsoft's Irish offices over the last couple of years and so it's nice to have achieved this level of certification.

While we may originally have started out offering Linux hosting only, over time we realised that we needed to be able to offer both Windows and Linux based solutions to our clientele.

We now offer Windows Server solutions that range from simple shared hosting, through Microsoft Exchange email hosting to fully managed clusters of Windows servers that power mission critical services for large ecommerce sites.

(And if you are a Windows user we would really encourage you to upgrade to Internet Explorer version 8.)

Several months ago when co.nl was in the planning stages we were asked if we would be interested in offering it to our clientele, and thus became the only accredited registrar for co.nl in Ireland.

We are now offering co.nl domain registrations via our main site.

Co.nl is an interesting alternative to .nl domains, as there are no local presence restrictions or requirements, so just about anyone can get a co.nl!

We obviously grabbed ours!

As an introductory offer we're offering them at EUR9.99.

One thing, however, as the co.nl domains have only gone "live" this week the registry operator is not allowing nameserver or contact updates until mid-June, so if you want to use external nameservers you will need to specify them during the signup.

This weekend is Easter, so it's a bank holiday in a lot of countries.

Our offices will be open as normal on Good Friday, 10th April 2009, however they will be closed on Monday 13th April 2009.

Technical support will be available over the weekend and on Monday, however the number of staff manning the helpdesk will be reduced.

The IEDR are closed on both Friday and Monday, so any new IE domain registration requests, transfers or updates will not be fully processed between close of business Thursday and start of business on Tuesday morning. Our backend system is integrated with that of the IEDR, so any requests received during that timeframe will be queued as normal.

Some of the other ccTLD registries that require manual operations will also be closed over the long weekend.

We hope all our clients are able to enjoy the short break and that you don't eat too many Easter eggs! (Our staff already got theirs!)

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