Recently in News Category

1. Blacknight
2. Hosting365.ie (Register365 nameserver)
3. Digiweb (including Novara ie. register.ie)
4. Letshost
5. IrishDomains

• my.tel - which allows you to manage your .tel easily from your mobile
• Superbook - which polls your iphone's address book for any .tel entries and then brings up the full contents (very cool!)

• .tel does not support "normal websites"
• You cannot specify your own nameservers - all .tel domains will be hosted by Telnic

1. An annual hosting plan (Minimus / Medius / Maximus)
2. A Google Adwords account that is less than 14 days old
   

• co.uk - general / business - no restriction and the most popular
  
• org.uk - non-profit - no restriction
• me.uk - individuals - no restriction
• ltd.uk - UK Limited Company - restricted - UK company details
• plc.uk - UK PLC - restricted
• net.uk - restricted - only open to UK ISPs
  
• sch.uk - restricted - only open to UK schools

At times I get out of bed in the morning and I wonder why on earth I'm involved in this "game". Maybe I should have got into something else.

But what?

The last couple of weeks' rain has inspired me, as well as soaking me to the skin.

Add to that the flooding of some parts of Carlow town (only a few hundred metres from our offices on the banks of The Barrow) over the weekend and I may have hit on the solution!

We're going to branch out into selling watersports equipment.

We'll start with Scuba gear, as we're probably all going to have to swim to the office soon anyway.

I'm not sure if we should really go full out on this or not:

What do you think?

Maybe we'll just stick with hosting for the moment ....

Damien Mulley has finally announced the launch of the 1st Irish Web Awards. Damien is also the driving force behind the Irish Blog Awards by the way.

Unlike so many of the other industry events that seem to gauge participation by the amount of money you are willing to spend, The Irish Web Awards are open to anyone and the sponsors are covering the costs (which makes sense!).

It will be interesting to see how much traction this new awards event is able to gain in both industry and elsewhere. At present there are several other award ceremonies being run every year, but each of them operates in a very different manner.

Disclosure: Blacknight host the sites for both the Irish Web Awards and The Irish Blog Awards

The IEDR, the people who look after the IE domain space, have announced the introduction of multiyear registrations of IE domains.

The change comes into effect at close of business Wednesday and will allow us to offer IE domains for periods up to 10 years, namely:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 10 year registration periods.

This change will not affect domain renewals or transfers, so if you already have a registered IE domain you cannot append years to its registration period at present.

The IEDR have said that they are looking into rectifying this at some point in the not too distant future.

If you're using Twitter you can now follow our updates from both this blog and our technical status one by simply following the blacknight user on Twitter.

Of course we're still offering email updates and RSS feeds, so if you aren't using Twitter you don't need to worry about it.

EDIT: updated twitter a/c to our new one

Image via Wikipedia

Leo Vegoda has posted an excellent followup of the session on the ICANN blog, summarising the speakers' various comments and thoughts.

While we may have some experience with ipv6 the session in Paris definitely opened my eyes to a whole set of issues that we will need to address moving forward.

Blacknight Solutions, Ireland's leading internet services company, is now accredited to sell .co.nl domain names. By registering a .co.nl domain name, for example myname.co.nl, registrants have the opportunity to reach a wider audience, particularly in The Netherlands.

Domain names with the .co.nl extension can be registered by anyone anywhere, unlike the .nl country code that requires a contact point in The Netherlands.

"Becoming an accredited registrar for .co.nl domain names allows us to give our clients an even wider range of options for registering domain names", said Blacknight CEO Michele Neylon.

"It extends the level of service we can offer our clients, making Blacknight Solutions a one-stop shop for all a businesses' internet hosting and domain name requirements."

With over three million .nl domain names already registered, obtaining your preferred .nl domain name can be difficult, however with this new extension, it will be much easier.

To ensure our clients get the .co.nl domain of your choice, Blacknight Solutions suggests contacting us as soon as possible to discuss requirements.

The .co.nl domain name extension was launched at the ICANN meeting in Paris held from 23-26 June, 2008. To ensure every person and every company has a fair chance to register their own .co.nl domain name, there will be a Sunrise process, as outlined below.

During this Sunrise period, every owner of a .nl and/or a valid trademark registration has the exclusive opportunity to register the international variant of their domain name within the defined Sunrise periods:
Sunrise 1: Grandfather period - commencing date Q3 2008
During the Grandfather period, owners of a .nl have an exclusive right to register their .co.nl as well. This implies that a registrant owning mydomain.nl, will be the only entity that has the opportunity to register mydomain.co.nl during the Grandfather period.

Sunrise 2: Registered Trademarks - commencing date Q4 2008
Domains that were not registered during Sunrise 1 (Grandfather) can still be claimed by trademark owners during the second phase. These applications will also be reviewed by a Verification Agent.

Multiple eligible applications of the same .co.nl name received during the 2nd Sunrise period will be assigned on a first come first served basis.

Landrush/ Go live - commencing date Q1 2009
In the Landrush phase, application requests can be made by the general public without restriction. They will be accepted on a first comes first served basis.

(Mentioned dates are merely indicative. Specific dates will be communicated two months before the actual launch)

Image via Wikipedia

Blacknight, Microsoft and PollDaddy provided prizes, with us offering a year's VPS hosting to the winner!

We'll be liasing with Alan to ensure he gets to make full use of his prize :)

We've been toying with the idea of providing "live chat" on our site for quite some time.

We finally found a software vendor whose product fit our criteria, so we're now offering live chat on our VPS hosting site.

All conversations are routed over 128 bit SSL, so your privacy is assured.

We would, of course, ask that people not handover credit card details etc., via the live chat system.

Staff from sales, technical support and accounts are available from 8 am to 6 pm Monday to Friday to answer your queries.

Of course if anyone has any feedback to give us either here or via email (management@blacknight.com) we'd love to hear it.

We're delighted to be involved in some little way with the next BarCamp event which is being held on Saturday, June 21st 2008 in Queen's University.

Unfortunately I won't be able to attend, as I will be in Paris for the ICANN meeting.

If you're interested in finding out more or would like to simply drop by you can find all the details over on the BarCamp site.

The list of attendees is growing nicely, so it should be an enjoyable and informative day for anyone interested in technology.

As of a few minutes ago we have dropped the price of IE domains across the board.

No special links or coupons required.

ALL IE domains are now 21 euro ex-vat for both new registrations and renewals.

We've also got a list of the latest dropped IE domains, so you can grab a previously owned domain - nothing wrong with secondhand domains!

Well it isn't quite Web 2.0. But it's now new and improved and shiny.

And before I get any complaints, we know Safari doesn't look perfect yet :-).

We've removed .net and Linux VPS plans, you now have a simplified version of the site that has VPS plans that are OS agnostic. When you click buy now you'll be able to use our fancy vps-shop web application to choose your OS and the package you want and whether or not you want to add Plesk!

So where is this fancy application I hear you cry. Any buy now link on Blacknightvps.com will now take you to it.

All pricing for each period and for plesk etc is all contained within the web app.

There's a few small issues outstanding that we'll be fixing in time.

1) Safari doesn't work well right now (if at all :/)
2) The initial page load is a little slow, we're aware of this, it's because of the volume of information being retrieved from our backend that causes this, we're working on it.
3) Changing OS doesn't appear to keep your selected options in all browsers. However if you change plan from basic to standard it keeps all your choices!
4) Non javascript users we'll have a more accessible version soon (within a week or two) that'll work particularly well for the visually impaired.

Please let us know what you think of the new simplified version of the site.

All feedback and comments are welcome.

I'm delighted to announce that the IE zone rebuilds are now more frequent.

The new zone rebuild times are:
10:00, 12:00, 17:00 and 22:00

AND it is set to rebuild 7 days a week, 365 days a year!

This is a major improvement for IE domain holders, as now updates, changes and new registrations will be processed much more efficiently.

Today is a historical day for the IE namespace, as it has finally breached the one hundred thousand domain barrier.

The graph below shows growth over time

It will be interesting to see how long it takes for the namespace to double again in size.

Compared to some of our EU neighbours 100 thousand domains is a very small number. The UK registry, Nominet, handles in excess of 100 thousand new registrations every month!

Of course it's a bit unfair to draw parallels between the UK and Ireland.

While there have been considerable improvements in the registration process many registrants still feel that the process is quite arduous compared to that of .com.

In many ways the biggest improvement was the introduction of an API, which allows companies such as ourselves to send registration requests, updates and deletions directly to the registry.

In real terms that means that as soon as you place an order for an IE domain on our site (and pay us) it gets sent into the registry's queue.

So, if you do a WHOIS lookup you'd see:

% Application Pending - There is currently an application being processed for % the domain name you have requested. If unsuccessful, the application would % expire on the date above.

While the technology has improved some of the policies haven't, which leads to many of us having a certain love/hate relationship with the namespace.

Personally I have mixed feelings about it.

On the one hand I've been more than happy to support the growth of the IE namespace over the last few years.

The relaxation of some of the rules has made it significantly easier to register domains, but there is always room for improvement.

On the other hand I can appreciate the frustration felt by many registrants.

Being forced to provide the infamous "supporting documentation" for each and every new domain name could be seen as having a very negative impact on the growth of ecommerce in Ireland.

Whether that perception is valid or not is debatable.

If you have a valid reason to register a domain name providing the documentation shouldn't be that arduous a task.

Unlike .com there are still literally thousands of excellent names available. If you have a look at some of the recently deleted domains you might find inspiration.

Want to setup a photography business? Album.ie is currently available to register

Or maybe you are an ET fan? Alien.ie is up for grabs, or at least it was when I looked a minute ago!

One of the strong points of the IE namespace is also its perceived weakness.

Being a "managed" registry end users should have some comfort and security when they interact with a website using the .ie extension. Security, however, is not without its price.

In the .com world it is arguably "too easy" to register a domain, provide false details and setup a scam. If you want to do the same thing in IE namespace you'd have to be willing to put in a lot more work!

Paul, our overworked and under appreciated CTO (who also happens to be my business partner) has been beavering away on enabling more cool stuff for the VPS hosting solutions.

One of the most requested features over the past few days has been support for more linux distributions.

Since there are a LOT of linux distributions we had to focus on the more important and popular ones, so Debian was pretty much top of the list.

You can now order Debian VPS (without plesk) via the online shop.

Rest assured that we do plan on adding more linux distributions, but as the old adage goes - Rome wasn 't built in a day, so we'd have to humbly ask you to bear with us.

Of course you don't have to wait if you don't want to, but hopping up and down won't speed things up...

Speaking of linux distros ...

We probably won't be adding support for Gentoo for some time if ever - sorry!

And now to distract you with a pretty image:

Of course it's more than just pretty.

With the virtual server solution powered by Parallels you can easily manage your virtual server (with full root access) from within the control panel. Want to reboot it or even stop it? How about a simple mouse click?
And if you break your VPS beyond recognition you can easily reinstall it from scratch and start all over. (I think I've broken mine about 4 times in the last 48 hours !!)

I'll probably post some screenshots or a screencast of the system when I get a chance.

But if there's any topic you'd like to see covered do let us know via the comments

We have finally launched the first set of new products and services that we've been working on for months.

As of last night Blacknight VPS hosting is open for business.

The new VPS hosting is the perfect solution for people who want to run custom setups without incurring the costs of dedicated hardware.

For example if you want to experiment with JSP, Ruby on Rails, Light HTTPD or want to install custom DLLs on Windows.

With a VPS you have full control. The only limits are your imagination and your credit card limit!

What's a VPS?

VPS stands for virtual private server.

It's hard to put it into really simple terms, but it's a way to give you the control and flexibility of a dedicated server at a fraction of the price.

What are Blacknight offering?

We're offering a full range of Windows Server 2003 64 bit and Centos 5 (Linux) based virtual servers.

Can I get a control panel for this?

Yes. All VPS servers come with the Virtuozzo Power Panel which gives you control over the basic operations of your VPS.

If you're not comfortable managing your server over SSH / RDP then you can opt to get Plesk as well.

What about other linux distros?

We'll be adding other popular Linux distributions in the coming weeks. For the moment we're offering the most popular alternative to RedHat Enterprise

Will you be offering Windows Server 2008?

We intend to offer it as soon as it is viable ie. fully supported and tested

The entire system is securely hosted in one of Ireland's leading data centres, Interxion in Dublin, Ireland.

In the last few months we've mentioned a lot of upgrades and improvements to our network. Part of the reason for doing all this was to make way for the rollout of our Parallels network.

If anyone has any feedback we'd really love to hear it.

Let us know in the comments or if you'd prefer discretion email management@blacknight.com

We informed you some time ago of an upcoming upgrade to our billing / control panel system.

You will probably receive an email from us later today regarding our billing system.

The text of the email is below:

Dear XXX

As you may know we are currently deploying a new billing and control panel system.

In order to facilitate the migration we would appreciate your help.

Please follow the link below to create your new control panel login.

NB: We will not ask you for any personal information at any time.

To create your new control panel login, please visit

Should you encounter difficulties please contact support@blacknight.com

--
Regards
Team Blacknight
http://www.blacknight.com

Once you get this email you will be able to setup your new login for our new billing system which will be going live very soon.
If you have any queries or issues please let us know.

NB: This change affects ALL Blacknight clients

If you want to know about any service affecting maintenance, technical updates or anything else of a technical nature, we recommend that you check out our new Technical Blog.

The site is hosted outside our core network (we don't even use our own nameservers just to be 100% safe!) and is part of our backup / contingency plans for emergency situations.

While our network uptime has been and hopefully will continue to be exemplary there's no reason to be lazy. We need to make sure that we have a system in place in case there is an issue NOT after the issue arises.

You can subscribe to the site's RSS feed OR to the email alerts.

Your choice :)

You can sign up for the email alerts by filling out the form below:

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

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.

We're hiring staff at the moment ... I've already mentioned some of the roles we need to fill and today I've got yet another one...

This time round its for an "experienced" *nix admin position.

Basically we've got loads of servers. They need lots of TLC ...

Here are the details:

Position: Unix Engineer

The Unix Engineer has a specific area of responsibility within the systems that comprise the Blacknight core service delivery infrastructure. He/she reports to the Support Supervisor. This role may require leadership of junior engineers. Close co-operation with the core systems engineers is essential.

Responsibilities associated with this role include, but are not limited to the following:

* Ensure that all Blacknight services run optimally; continuously monitor performance against published SLA targets; consistently strive for excellence and highest system uptimes
* Assume special responsibility for Unix/Linux-based service delivery systems:
* Shared unix web servers and mail servers
* Unix/Linux-based database servers
* Support to dedicated or co-located customers on Unix/Linux systems who have bought managed services
* Advanced dedicated server development
* Unix/Linux-specific backups
* Plan and implement future developments, such as systems upgrades, using detailed plans and scheduled upgrade or implementation cycles
* Maintain/upgrade current anti-virus, backup, and other management software on Unix/Linux systems;
* Support deployment of hardware, software, service, and maintenance of all information technology assets
* Maintain full security on all systems
* Some development of in house applications may be required
* Assist in resolving systems outages out-of-hours through participation in an engineer call-out roster

Skills / Knowledge

* Deep knowledge of networking protocols (DNS/IPsec/POP3/SMTP and TCP/IP in mixed operating system environments)
* Experience managing Linux and other open-source operating systems essential, scripting ability essential, experience with commercial Unix, such as Solaris, an advantage
* Familiarity with Quagga the open-source routing suite desirable
* Software development experience in PHP and/or PERL desirable
* Working knowledge of Windows-based server operating systems
* Ability to build, run, and scale most ISP services from source
* Experience with Java, Tomcat, JSP deployments, ability to deploy and support such deployments
* Extensive knowledge of project-based software upgrade plans, ability to plan, write, communicate, and execute project and/or test plans
* Excellent understanding of firewalls and network security essential; experience with management of and planning of deployments of Cisco PIX or Fortinet firewalls essential
* Disaster recovery planning/testing
* Hands-on experience of backup software essential
* hardware diagnostic skills would be desirable, be able to trouble shoot problems with servers to determine if a fault is software of hardware based and be able to use your own initiative to contact vendors for replacements where applicable

PERSONAL ATTRIBUTES:

* Excellent communication skills
* Must be forward thinking and have good planning skills
* Excellent troubleshooting, judgment, and decision-making skills
* High level of self-motivation and proven ability for self-study and learning on the job
* Flexible and dependable, On-call work and Out of hours duties may be required from time to time (this is paid extra)
* Team player

QUALIFICATIONS/ EXPERIENCE

* 3 years experience working in a similar role

Salary

* Negotiable, between € 28,000 and €35,000 plus benefits and depending on experience

EDIT: The job is based in our offices in Carlow ...

When I first setup Blacknight we were a very very very small operation without any staff, offices or anything else.

Nowadays we have a growing team and are constantly expanding.

Our offices are quite comfortable, though we're going to be extending them very soon.

We're currently looking for more staff to help us expand and grow and offer our clients quality service and support.

There are currently 4 positions open and it would be really nice if we could fill them.

On the technical side there are two roles.

One is technical support L1. In simple terms the L1 technical support role is the "frontline". You'd be dealing with our clients via email, phone and other methods (we're not using Livechat at present, but we may do...). It would be a junior position and in order to qualify you'd need to have a good balance of humour, patience and an interest in IT. You don't need to have a degree in IT. In fact you don't need a degree at all, though it would be helpful...

The other technical role is as "Data Centre Technician". I'll post the full job spec further down, but the basic outline is that you'd be working primarily in Dublin (Clondalkin and Park West) and liasing with clients and the rest of the team.

The other roles are on the sales team.

It's 2008. Ireland is part of the EU. It would be downright silly to not want to staff capable of communicating with our European neighbours. So we're looking for multilingual sales staff. The languages we'd be interested in would be (in no particular order): Spanish, French, German or Italian. However if you have other EU languages then do feel free to contact us.

The other sales role is "straight" sales.

Both sales roles are based in our offices in Carlow and the candidates would report directly to our sales manager.

So, without further ado, here are the details of the Data Centre Technician role:

Position: Data Centre Technician

The Data Centre Technician role would be suited to someone who has previously worked for a Data Centre/large corporate with 500+ server deployments. He/she reports to the Technical Director. This role will involve close co-operation with the deployment and sales teams regarding new/current and furture customer deployments.

Responsibilities associated with this role include, but are not limited to the following:

* Ensure that all Blacknight customer installs go smoothly and that there is ample space, power, hardware on site for each deployment; liase with hardware vendors regarding delivery of DC specific hardware; consistently strive for excellence.
* Provide hands and eyes support on-site when necessary during business hours
* Ensure that all customer subscribed services are setup within SLAs outlined in contracts.
* Plan and implement future developments, such as systems upgrades, using detailed plans and scheduled upgrade or implementation cycles
* Keep track of all deliveries to and from our two Dublin POPs.
* Support deployment of hardware, software, service, and maintenance of all information technology assets
* Assist in resolving systems outages out-of-hours through participation in an engineer call-out roster

Skills / Knowledge

* Basic knowledge of networking protocols (DNS/IPsec/POP3/SMTP and TCP/IP in mixed operating system environments)
* Experience managing Linux and other open-source operating systems ideal, scripting ability essential, experience with commercial Unix, such as Solaris, an advantage
* Cisco IOS experience, switch configuration and general Layer 2 topology awareness
* Hardware skills with Intel based servers from vendors such as Dell, HP and Intel.
* Meticulous care in deploying servers and all Blacknight, customer equipment and all network cabling.
* Attention to detail regarding keeping records up to date
* Disaster recovery planning/testing
* Hardware diagnostic skills would be desirable, be able to trouble shoot problems with servers to determine if a fault is software of hardware based and be able to use your own initiative to contact vendors for replacements where applicable

PERSONAL ATTRIBUTES:

* Excellent communication skills
* Must be forward thinking and have good planning skills
* Excellent troubleshooting, judgment, and decision-making skills
* High level of self-motivation and proven ability for self-study and learning on the job
* Flexible and dependable, On-call work and Out of hours duties may be required from time to time
* Team player

QUALIFICATIONS/ EXPERIENCE

* 1 year experience working in a similar role

Salary

* Negotiable, between € 23,000 and €27,500 plus benefits and depending on experience

If interested please send CV in RTF or PDF format with covering email to management@blacknight.com.

Recruitment agencies NOT welcome. Cold calls / emails from recruitment agencies in relation to these or any other vacancies will not be welcome and will be treated with contempt.

Much to my amazement we've made it through to the shortlist for this year's Irish blog awards!

The competition in the business blog category is particularly tough, but it was nice to have made it this far.

Best of luck to everyone!!

We've been active members of the Irish Internet Association for the last number of years and have been happy to sponsor several of their events in the past.

This year's event takes place in the Croke Park Conference Centre on Friday May 15th

This year the IIA's conference will be focussing on social networking and new media.

We'll be providing more details on the speakers and the rest of the day's details as soon as they are forthcoming.

At least two or three of our team should be at the event, so please do make yourselves known. There might even be a prize draw for something really cool and useful... If nothing else we'll definitely have a few hoodies and polo shirts to give away (they're really comfy!)

If you haven't done so already I'd recommend that you subscribe to our blog's feed to be kept up to date!

Next Saturday is a date that should be marked in every Irish web professional's calendar, as it marks the first "event" organised by the members of Irish Webmaster Forum. (You don't have to be a member to participate!)

Where?

Harbour Master, Mayor Street, IFSC, Dublin 1

When?

Saturday February the 9th. 7.30 PM til ...... I guess that's up to you!

The original thread that started it all off is here, but it's been mentioned on quite a few people's blogs and sites over the last few days.

Although I won't be able to attend due to prior engagements (translation - I have to go and see my mother before she disowns me and had arranged it beforehand) I'm hoping that some of our other staff may be able to make it, but even if they don't we'll be there in "spirit", as we're sponsoring the event.

I'll expect a full report with photos from the attendees!

DomainFest is being held in Hollywood in a couple of weeks and we're proud to be one of the sponsors.

The event is one of the most important in the calendar for people involved in the domain industry and, if last year's event was anything to go by, it should draw a very interesting crowd from the four corners of the globe.

Last year I got to meet people from every aspect of the industry, so I'm hoping that this year will be similar. I've spoken to several people over the last couple of months who plan on attending THIS event since they had such a good time last year.

Unlike a lot of other industry events I've been to DomainFest manages to mix the business and pleasure to provide an almost perfect cocktail. You can easily find yourself having a drink in the bar with an unassuming multi-millionaire if you're not careful!

Of course a conference wouldn't be a conference if it didn't have speakers and at least one keynote. Last year they had TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, while this year's line up includes John Battelle, whose name may be familiar to anyone involved in SEO.

The agenda for this year's event looks very interesting and I will try to post more details as soon as they become available.

Similar to last year's event there are two "tracks" available.

If you're a DomainSponsor client, then you can learn about some of their new products and services.

However if you're more interested in hearing and discussing the latest trends in the domain name industry then the main track will be the place to be.

The topics on the agenda include new TLDs, legal issues, portfolio management and the famous networking sessions.

Last year was the first time I'd ever been to a networking session that was so intense and so incredibly productive! It's like speed dating, except it's for business contacts!

My biggest concern, of course, is not to get too involved in the live auction! It would be oh so easy to spend large amounts of money when you see the preliminary list of domains that are going to be on offer.

I'll be flying out to LA towards the middle of next week, as I want to take a couple of days prior to the event proper. At least that way I won't be able to use the excuse of jetlag if I spend the company's profits on dodgy domain names!

If you're reading this in a web browser instead of an RSS reader you should notice that it's look and feel has changed quite a bit.

We're currently rolling out our new design and look.. Over the next few days we'll be upgrading all the public facing sections of our sites etc., to give you a new uniform look and feel...

Hopefully you all like green and black - it's purely coincidence that Green & Black are my favourite chocolates as well!

Anyhow we've updated the blog (that's here!) and the forum so far and the support area is next on the list

Thanks to the guys in Spoiltchild for the design and 2BScene for the implementation work

Our support area has been upgraded to the latest version of Kayako, which is the software we use to run it.

We'll be tweaking the settings, and customising the look and feel over the coming days, so don't be put off if it looks a bit different!

A few things may not have been transferred over during the upgrade, but they will be restored to all their glory over the coming days.. It will also give you a chance to get a first look at the new style design that we will be unveiling shortly. We hope you like it!

I mentioned the upcoming eNum event a couple of weeks ago.

I've just received details from them about the day's event and it sounds like it could be very interesting:
Venue: Gresham Hotel, O'Connell St, Dublin 1
Date: Wednesday 28th November 2007
Time: 4.00 p.m. to 7.00 p.m. (followed by drinks and snacks)

here will be no charge to attend the information session.
(parking available; close to DART and LUAS)

Agenda:

* Welcome and Introduction (IENUM)
* ENUM in Ireland (IENUM)
* ENUM in Austria (IPA)
* ENUM in the UK (BT)
* How to become an ENUM registrar (IENUM)
* ENUM - an Irish implementation (Soft Telecom)
* ENUM – an industry-led policy perspective (ENUM Policy Advisory Board)
* Open forum - Q&A
Objectives of the session:

• Share the experiences of ENUM in Europe, and understand the various business models used by registrars
• Inform about the benefits to service providers of being an ENUM tier 2 registrar
• Show how to become an ENUM registrar
• Discuss technical implementation details of ENUM and VoIP
• Share experience of a practical business implementation in Ireland -
ENUM as a tool to connect remote sites

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

Tomorrow morning personal IE domains will be made available for the first time.

We've been accepting registration requests for the last few weeks, so tomorrow morning at zero hour we will be submitting the queued requests to the IE Domain Registry.

If you haven't ordered a personal IE domain then you still have time, though obviously your choices will be more restricted if your surname is common.

For those of you who have already submitted your registration requests and sent us in the documentation you can sit back and relax. If we need anything more from you our sales team will be in touch.

Of course if there is a large volume of requests there will be delays. We've been warned by the IEDR to expect delays, so we must ask you to please be patient.

If you have any queries do not hesitate to contact our sales staff, but please bear in mind that the volume of queries may result in there being a longer delay in replies than is normal.

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.

The next ICANN meeting is being held in Los Angeles, California.

Although the meeting doesn't officially start until the Monday there will be meetings and events over the weekend as well.

I'll be attending again, as there are quite a few topics of interest on the table.

If you're interested in the meeting schedule, then it's available on the site.

The meeting will also include a special event in honour of Vint Cerf who has served ICANN since the beginning.

When: Wednesday 17th of October @ 22:30 hours

What:

Firewall Upgrade. We're moving our colocation and dedicated server
customers out from behind the current HA pair of firewalls. We've
indicated recently on our blog that we bought 4 new Cisco ASA firewalls
and the time has arrived to install them.

Who will be affected:

Both of our firewalled networks will be affected by this. Firstly
our shared hosting firewall will be moved to a new IP address on the
WAN side to facilitate VPN configurations for our colocation and dedicated customers.

Secondly the new ASAs will be put in place and they will replace the current
firewalls and access routers for these customers.

We estimate around 30 minutes to an hour to move the shared hosting firewall
and around another 30 minutes to an hour to facilitate the new firewall
install. This includes all the cabling work etc that will need to be done.

We will also allow a further hour for testing of both networks, so we're looking
at a maximum of 3 hours for this work to be completed.

Summary:

All colocation, dedicated and shared hosting customers will be affected by this outage.

We mentioned the pending "death" of php4 some time ago.

It now seems that some people have got together to help push the move to php5 forward and have set a deadline of sorts.

The "go php5" site lists software projects that support php 5.2 and greater natively ie. without "dirty hacks" or any other messing about.

As I mentioned previously, most scripts should work properly under php 5, but there will always be exceptions!

If you'd like to find out more about why switching to php5 makes sense have a look at their FAQ.

The idea behind this is to give people that extra "push":

PHP version 5 adds a number of new features and design changes that make developing robust, secure, feature-rich software faster and easier. Those features do not exist in older versions of PHP 4, however, and many are very hard to emulate. Such features include fast and easy XML support for improved web services, better timezone handling, vastly improved database tools and input tools to make PHP applications more secure, and many others.

Projects that support PHP 4 cannot make use of those newer features, however. That means projects have to choose between supporting PHP 4, which has been in maintenance-only mode for over three years, or enabling modern web applications and services. For a long time many projects have chosen to support PHP 4 because of the large number of web hosts running PHP 4. Unfortunately that has resulted in a "chicken and egg" problem where web hosts have no incentive to upgrade to PHP 5, which means PHP developers can't use PHP 5's new functionality even if they want to.

By announcing that many leading open source projects will drop legacy support for PHP 4 at a fixed later date, we believe we can break that cycle and encourage web hosts to upgrade and allow open source developers to build faster, more secure, more powerful web applications.

Now if only we could persuade people to stop using MS SQL 2000 and FrontPage!!

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

Voting has now opened in the 2007 Irish Internet Association Net Visionary Awards.

I've been nominated under both Internet Entrepreneur and the Online Trader categories, so any and all votes would be appreciated!

There's also quite a few other names on the list that are familiar to us here at Blacknight. They belong to friends, business partners, clients and acquaintances. I wish them all the best of luck!

Personal IE domains will be available from October 31st 2007.

Basically if you want to register yourname.ie you will be able to do so after October 31st.

Since we expect that there will be a high demand for these domains we have put in place a queuing mechanism.

How will this work?

Our development team have put together a queuing system to hold the orders until October 31st.
Any orders for personal IE domains placed between now and October 31st at 8am will be submitted to the registry on the "go live" day.

What happens if two people want the same domain?

Domain registrations are on a first come first served basis. We will be submitting the requests to the IEDR in the order in which they were received. We cannot offer ANY guarantees (neither can anyone else)

What if someone else orders the domain from another company?

As already mentioned it's "first come, first served".

What if my chosen name is taken on the "go live" day?

We will offer people the opportunity of registering an alternative personal domain

Is Blacknight's system better than other?
Other companies have also setup queues, but only one or two of them have their servers physically in the same data centre as the IEDR.
Some of the other companies don't even have servers in Ireland, so their connections to the IEDR's API servers will be significantly slower.

If you'd like to find out what people are getting upto in the wonderful world of mobile devices and the mobile web, then Mobile Monday is the place for you.

On Monday next, September 24th Mobile Monday Demo Night will take place in The Hairy Lemon, which is in central Dublin (map)

Several companies will be showing off their latest creations so it should be good fun.

As we're promoting .mobi domains at present it's only natural that we also take the time to promote mobile web related stuff, so we'll be sponsoring the event.

More info here

Just got this email from the IEDR:

It has once again come to the attention of the IEDR that a company operating under the name “Internet Register Ireland” is in the process of contacting businesses with registered .ie domain names by post and by fax, soliciting them to register their domain name with the “Internet Register Ireland”. The “Internet Register Ireland”, a German based company will request you to fill out their form and return it to them signed. It should be noted that they charge an excessive fee of approximately €958 for the registration of the .ie domain name in their database.

We would like to reassure all of our customers that no such organisation has been authorised to act on behalf of the IEDR. If you are contacted in this manner we would recommend that you disregard this letter and advise your customers to be aware of this activity.

The IEDR are responding to enquiries from concerned domain holders, by recommending them to contact an official IE Reseller if they require any further Internet services for their website.

We mentioned their activities last year.

One of things that I have a love / hate relationship are servers. For the MD of a hosting company that's probably an odd thing to say.

I love the fact that we have so many.

I don't love the fact that they cost so much - the numbers involved get a bit silly when you buy as many as we do!

We get a lot of our hardware from Dell.

At the moment we are working on a project which needs quite a bit of hardware, so we're currently taking delivery from Dell by the van load.

We got a van load of servers today, so at lunchtime Paul Kelly, our CTO, took this photo of some of the boxes stacked up in our warehouse (that's another day's story!)

For the geekier types - you can probably work out that a lot of the smaller boxes are rail kits, while the bigger boxes are for rack mountable servers.

The photo was taken with a Nokia N95 if you are interested :)

The IE Domain Registry have finally released details of the policy change on personal domains which I've mentioned in the past. (For a long rant please see my personal blog)

We will be offering personal IE domains from October 31st 2007 onwards.

For clarity I am republishing the full text of the IEDR's press release:

The IE Domain Registry (IEDR), the managed registry for Ireland’s dot-ie domain names, today announced the relaxation of the rules for registering personal dot-ie domain names for individuals. This policy relaxation comes into effect following full consultation with the dot-ie reseller community and industry organisations.

Over the course of the next few weeks I'll be doing an occasional series of posts on making the most of your dotmobi domain.

If anyone has any suggestions or ideas that they'd like to share please let me know!

The topics I intend to cover will include things like building a site, checking it, making money from it and any other topics that people suggest to me.

What's the deal?
We are running a sale on dotmobi (.mobi) domains starting today.

How much will they cost?
Registrations of .mobi domains will cost a mere 10 euro per annum, so you can make big savings by registering your domain for up to 10 years.

What is .mobi (dotmobi)?

Dotmobi is the domain for the mobile web.

If a company publicises a .mobi site it should work on your mobile device and you should be able to make full use of it.

How can I test my dotmobi site?

You can test your .mobi site to see if it will work properly on a mobile phone using the ready.mobi suite of tests.

Who is behind dotmobi?

Dotmobi is supported by some of the biggest names in mobile and general technology including Ericsson, Google, GSM Association, Hutchison (3), Microsoft, Nokia, Orascom Telecom, Samsung Electronics, Syniverse, T-Mobile, Telefonica Moviles, TIM, Visa and Vodafone.

How can I register a .mobi?
You can check if your chosen domain is available by doing a search here

Starting Monday 10th September 2007 we'll be running a special promotion on new dotmobi domain registrations.

I've mentioned dotmobi in the past.

It's the domain for the mobile web.

Forget about WAP - think of browsing and using the internet and online services on your mobile device - be that a Nokia tablet, an n95 or even on an iphone.

It doesn't have to be a painful experience!

In any case we'll provide more details of the offer on Sunday night / Monday morning.

We're happy to be sponsoring the .net Magazine Awards 2007. The awards, which have 16 categories, have been running for several years and attract quite a bit of interest internationally.

We had a choice to make when it came to the sponsorship and it wasn't an easy one. Which category did we want to be associated with?

In the end I had to follow my heart and go with "Standards Champion", which is described as being awarded for:
the best use of accessible design in 2007. Nominees will be judged on standards compliance, originality, and downright sexiness.

I've always been a fan of web standards, as they make life easier for all parties concerned.

While it may be difficult to be 100% standards compliant 100% of the time, there's no reason why a website cannot aspire to standards compliance all of the time.
There's a subtle, but important, difference here. If you give it your best then you can feel satisfied that you have made an honest effort to reach out to as many web users as possible. (Why do you think we use text based captcha on our company sites?)

The full list of categories are (in no particular order):

• New site of the year – the people's choice


• Web app of the year


• Best socially powered site


• Best mashup


• Interactive Award - the best use of Flash


• Blog of the year


• Podcast of the year


• Design agency of the year


• The innovation award


• Web personality of the year


• Viral campaign of the year


• Standards champion


• The open source award


• Redesign of the year


• Infamy Award


• Mobile site of the year

Who is judging it?

Well Future Publishing are the event organisers (they own .net magazine), so they have a lot of clout and this is reflected in the calibre of the judging panel

We'll publish more information on the awards as and when we receive them.

So get voting!

The IE Domain Registry will be conducting maintenance on their systems on the mornings of Tuesday September 4th and Wednesday September 5th 2007.

From 6 am to 9 am no orders for new IE domains will be processed.

Our accounts department will be closed on Thursday and Friday this week, as one of our staff, Leona, is tying the proverbial knot. Since most of the office is invited to the wedding on Thursday we'll be closing accounts on Thursday and Friday. (Yes if you want to pay us we'll be able to manage it!).

On the subject of weddings this year has been very busy chez Blacknight with three members of the team getting married.

George, our sales manager, tied the knot earlier this summer. Carla, one of our programmers got married this weekend and now we have Leona following suit.

We wish them all the best!

If you are a mobile user then you might be interested in adding the Blacknight widset to your account.

It's a nice little alternative to using an RSS reader to get the latest news, tips and rants from team Blacknight!

More info on the Widsets site

Over the next few weeks and months we'll be rebranding slightly.

It's not going to be one of those "huge" rebranding exercises where we change the company name, fire all the staff and move our offices to Los Angeles or anything crazy like that.

We'll simply start using a couple of the domains that we have more actively than the blacknight.ie domain that we have been using for the last few years.

Unless one of our beloved sysadmins does something really silly none of you will really notice anything different, until the new website is launched.

Why are we doing this?

For a couple of very simple reasons.

Over the past few years we have been working hard on building up our business in Ireland, Europe and further afield.

We now have clients from every major country in the world and while we may love our .ie domain it may not portray the image that our clients need.

We would have opted for .com, but we have one of those "waiting in the wings" for another project that will be launched later this year (hopefully)

So for the moment we will start pushing blacknight.eu.

As I mentioned elsewhere, the best way of promoting a domain is to use it, so that's what we intend doing.

Of course we may be stark raving bonkers and this could be the worst marketing decision I've made so far this year, but I can live with that :)

Any feedback is, as always, welcome

Our team of networking engineers like to keep our network running smoothly and I am happy to say that they do a very good job of it overall.

Of course this means that from time to time they have to upgrade and patch things.

So between 27th and 28th of August we will be doing maintenance on our Cisco switches, which involves upgrading the IOS on some of the devices.

The affected switches will have to be rebooted, so there could be a loss of connectivity for up to a minute as the devices reboot.

Since we're doing this in the middle of the night it should not affect many clients as it is set to happen between 2200 and 0200 GMT. If you are located in the US for example that would be 1600 to 2000...

In any case there's more info on the forum

BarCamp Galway takes place on 22nd September and we're delighted to be sponsors.

We may even get to send someone to attend the event! Though I won't confirm that just yet, as it seems to curse any chance of it happening if I do!

In any case you can find out more on the event's blog or on the wiki.

So far to date we seem to have sponsored every barcamp event that's been held in the 32 counties!

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!

Nominations are now open for the Irish Internet Association's annual awards - the Net Visionaries. The timeline and details are available on their site.

We were involved with the awards for the last couple of years and I would consider it to be the only true internet award in Ireland at present as it is well respected within industry circles.

If you would like to nominate someone then you can do so directly here

The categories cover both the technical and business side of the internet business and you DO NOT have to be a member to nominate or get nominated.

Due to work pressures I wasn't able to attend the event we sponsored down in Cork yesterday evening.

Damien tells me that there was a good turnout, so I'm delighted.

The IT@Cork blog has a review of the event as well.

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

We registered a couple of .mobi domains earlier this year for two reasons:

• Brand protection
• Branching out
• We're a bit geeky!

As the .mobi registration rules are quite different to those of other TLDs we were going to be obliged to actually use the domain for mobile content of some kind (which is a good thing!).

However, after meeting several people from .mobi in LA and also talking to other people about the entire mobile space I thought it would be a much better idea to actually use the domains productively instead of merely shelving them.

So there are now two .mobi domains pointing at our mobile site.

I think we're the first Irish hosting company to put a .mobi site live! So that's another little first for us!

The site is not a copy of the main Blacknight site, nor was it my intention to even try to make it a copy of the current site.

It's sole purpose is it to provide some basic info about us if anyone happens upon the site while using their mobile phone.

At some stage I'd like to see us using the site to actually offer services, but it's not very high up on our ever-growing "todo list".

It would be nice to see more Irish companies embracing the .mobi TLD and doing "funky" things with their dotmobi domains, so if anyone has done something cool I'd really love to hear about it.

The guys from .mobi have found some really nice examples of mobile sites that provide useful information and services.

I was browsing some of their "picks" on my Nokia this evening (at no cost thankfully, since it connects to my wireless network) and I was truly impressed.

I've always loved The Godfather so I was delighted to see that Paramount's mobile site has plenty of content up for grabs. Unfortunately it won't work with an Irish phone, but I love the idea (maybe I can bribe an American colleague to get some of the content for me?)

So if you'd like to find out more about .mobi, then let us know or simply register one today - they don't cost that much!

One or two of us will be down in the "real" capital, Cork, next Wednesday evening for a talk we're sponsoring on Firefox 3.

The talk, which is being held in conjunction with It@Cork, is being given by Marcio Galli of the Mozilla foundation:

FireFox - A Web-browser, a Platform, a Framework.

A talk on Web development and advanced applications with upcoming Mozilla Firefox 3.

The presentation focuses on demonstrations of new features of the Firefox "platform" built on open standards with the focus on technology cases and development opportunities.

Target audiences: Computer science students, web developers, software engineers, entrepreneurial individuals, and more."

For further details and to register see the It@Cork site

So if you'd like to find out what the future of Firefox is going to be like, then why not drop by?

The event is being held out in the National Software Centre in Mahon, so hopefully the traffic around the Jack Lynch tunnel won't be too heavy, or I might be late!

We have been notified by clients of a new domain scam.

The emails come from a company calling themselves "Domain Renewal"

These emails are not from us and should be ignored. If you want to forward them to us please do.

The emails follow the following format:

It is time to renew your domain name www.domain.com

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Your domain name www.domain.com will expire within 90 days.
You may renew your domain automatically with Domain Renewal. Click on the link in this
e-mail to renew the domain for another year. You should renew your domain as soon as
possible in order for it to continue to be registered in your name.

Click here if you wish to renew your domain
--------> http://www.domainrenewalonline.com/for.php?d=domain.com

As soon as we have received your payment, you will receive a confirmation that your domain
has been renewed.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Services and information about Domain Renewal
Domain Renewal maintains domain addresses, and registers and consults companies in
relation to Internet domain ownership. We inform businesses about which domains are
registered, and remind them if a domain is due to expire, or when it is time to renew a domain.
If you want Domain Renewal to extend the domain for you, we ask you to click on the link in
this e-mail. If you do not wish to use your domain after the due date for renewal, you may
disregard this e-mail. When Domain Renewal extends your domain no information will be
changed in the “Whois” information section. The domain will be extended for 1 year. You will
therefore continue with your current supplier. You may also request your Internet Service
Provider to renew the domain for you. If you have any further questions please do not hesitate
to contact our customer service centre by sending an e-mail to
support@domainrenewalonline.com

DO NOT CLICK ON THE LINK

The insecure website it takes you to will ask you for your credit card information and will try to charge you USD69 for the domain renewal. (We only charge EUR8.25)

If you have any queries about the status of domains registered through our services please feel free to contact us.

PHP4 will be discontinued at the end of 2007.

The PHP developers have announced that they will no more releases of php4 after the end of 2007.

We've been rolling out php5 on both our Windows and Linux servers for the last few months and will be discontinuing support for php4 at the end of 2007.

Most popular 3rd party scripts should work fine on php5, but some older ones may have issues. We'd recommend that people look into upgrading their scripts to support PHP5, as they're probably vulnerable in other ways also.

If you have any queries about this please let us know.

I meant to post an update on Friday afternoon, but didn't ....

In any case everything should now be working as before.

All sections of the billing system should be working as normal.

If there are any duplicate invoices on your account or anything odd, please let account@blacknight.ie know.

They may not reply to your email immediately, but they will act on it.

One of the things you learn in business is that things will always go wrong when you least expect it.

You can invest as much time and energy as you like in trying to avoid mistakes, but they will still happen.

We had one of those issues this morning with our billing system!

While it might be easier to shove my head in the sand or try to blame someone else when these kind of things happen, I personally couldn't.

I've tried to email as many of our clients as possible who may have been affected by the problem, but it still does not detract from how much inconvenience this may have caused some people.

And now to explain it all .....

A number of our clients were affected by a programming mishap yesterday when our developers synced the IE domain renewal dates with the IEDR.

We are terribly sorry if you were affected by this and as managing director of the company I feel it is my responsibility to contact anyone who may have been affected to offer my apologies and an explanation.

Over the past few months our development team have been working on improving our billing system.

One area that was causing issues were the renewal dates of some IE domains, in particular those that had been transferred from another provider to ourselves.

While fixing this issue our developers managed to break part of the internal logic, which led to invoices being reissued for domains that had already been renewed.

As soon as we realised what had happened we took steps to reverse the issue and will be removing any invoices that were created in error.

I am terribly sorry if this caused you any inconvenience and if I can be of any assistance to you please let me know.

If you have any invoices on your account relating to IE domains with an issue date of July 4th 2007 then they are possibly affected.

Any invoices with dates prior to this should be correct.

We hope to have rectified the issue within the next 24 hours, but if you have any doubts please do let us know.

If you need to contact our accounts team please use accounts@blacknight.ie or contact me directly (michele@blacknight.ie) and I will personally look into the matter for you.

Sorry about this !

As a company based in Carlow it's nice to see sites that serve the local community being hosted by us.

One such site is Carlow.pl, which completed its migration from a server in Poland this weekend.

Carlow.pl was setup to serve both the Irish and Polish communities in the greater Carlow area and is available in both Poish and English.

The site's administrator, Krystian Kozerawski, moved to Carlow about eighteen months ago and started work on the site before Christmas of last year.

As the non-English speaking population in Irish regional towns grows it's nice to see new sites and services launching to cater to their needs, so we were delighted to offer Krystian and his community some space on our servers.

I'll be looking forward to seeing what he does with some of the other regional portals he has planned!

If you are trading under your own name now is the time to register your IE domain.

Why?

It is highly likely that the IE Domain Registry will be amending the rules governing "personal" IE domains.

What does this mean?

Soon any Irish resident will be able to register theirname.ie ie. if your name is Pat Murphy, you will be able to register patmurphy.ie, as long as your official documents list your name as "Pat" and not "Patrick".

We'll make more announcements on the subject as the official changes are announced, but we would expect to see an IEDR policy change in the next 2 months.

We're doing some more work on our core network this week, as we finally get to put our new Juniper routers live.

There shouldn't be any network downtime, as BGP should allow us simply to route the traffic elsewhere while making the changes, however when there are computers and humans involved you can never be sure :)

So to that end we are issuing the following maintenance notification:

When: Wednesday 13th, Thursday 14th of June (2007)
Time: 23:00 - 01:00

During this period we intend to switch off the BGP sessions on the router that is being replaced. We'll lose Level(3) and Smart telecom. If Tiscali (our third carrier) have any issues, we could potentially loose international connectivity for a time during the upgrade. All INEX connectivity will not be affected during this upgrade. We estimate 10 - 15 minutes where we will be "at risk" during the swap over.

What:

We are upgrading our edge routers to Juniper Service Routers from their current configuration. This will happen in two stages,
1 which will happen in the above time slot and the other during another time slot that has yet to be decided upon. There are several reasons for upgrading to Juniper service routers.

a) Additional port density, this means we can add more carriers, a second INEX connection and also take on services like Packet Exchanges eXpand and ProXimity services to give us further reach through global private peering.

b) As part of our ever expanding network we have to take into consideration our growth. Our traffic to the general internet has more than doubled in the past 12 months. These new service routers will allow us to continue this growth.

c) INEX are adding a second physical network, similar to LINX in London, and we'll have our second connection to that. This'll give us more capacity on INEX but also give us much greater redundancy and remove the single point of failure that we currently have.

We've just put a new shared Linux server live.

It's running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as all of our newer Linux servers do.

What makes this server special is that it is the first one to come with MySQL 5 on Linux (on our network at least).

Hopefully the new server will live up to its namesake :)

Since we run a firewalled network giving clients direct access to the MS SQL servers has always been a security issue.

With MySQL there are open source web frontends, such as PhpMyAdmin, that do a fantastic job at providing a web frontend to the database server. You don't need to be a hardcore DBA to manipulate your data, optimise or repair tables, take backups etc., etc.

But what about Microsoft SQL server?

While there are a couple of open source solutions out there none of them come even close to offering the levels of functionality needed.

So what could we do?

The solution lay in France with a little company called myLittleTools S.A.R.L..

They offer two web based products for MS SQL management:

• MyLittleAdmin - which allows you to control your database


• MyLittleBackup - which is a tool for managing backups and restores

This latest addition to our offerings goes well with our recent announcement of an increased number of databases with most of our ASP.net hosting plans (Windows 2003).

Over the last few months we've seen a steady increase in requests for MS SQL 2005 databases.

Up until earlier today we were quite conservative in our allocation of MS SQL 2005 databases, but we've changed all that.

We're now offering a database per site on all MS SQL plans ie. if the hosting plan supports 16 sites then you get 16 databases, so every site can have its own database.

So what's that mean for our hosting plans?

Put simply they've just got that bit better !

(we also added more MySQL databases as well..)
If you want to compare our hosting plans, then have a look at our hosting comparison chart

Although I normally don't talk about what other companies are up to here, the RegisterFly situation is of such gravity that it would be silly not to. It also affects a small number of our clients.

If you haven't been following the news in the media (both online and offline) let me summarise it for you very briefly.

RegisterFly were an ICANN accredited registrar. However, unlike the bulk of ICANN registrars they had never been accredited directly, as they actually purchased an existing registrar ie. they got their accreditation through an acquisition.

Whether all the details of what happened internally will ever come to light or not is doubtful, but ICANN's briefing document(PDF) is quite revealing.

In essence the company had issues both technical and business related which led to a large number of complaints. ICANN finally pulled their accreditation, but then the registrars (domain owners) faced the problem of moving their domains elsewhere.
You can follow the saga as it unfolds on the ICANN blog

Here at Blacknight we don't release fluffy press releases.

We believe in giving you value for money and great service.

So, for one week only - ie. until Friday March 30th 2007 - we will be dropping the price of IE domains.

Register a new .ie domain for a mere 25 euro ex-vat.
Already got an IE domain? Transfer it to us for 25 euro!!

That's right - 25 euro only and you can get your own IE domain.

You don't need to host with us (though we'd strongly encourage it) and there are no silly strings attached.

This offer will end in one week so take advantage of it now!

Go to our site today and place your order!

NB: Our webmaster is editing our site at this moment, so please ignore any references to older higher prices.

Ronan Kirby from RedHat did a nice write up on his trip to Skycon the other week.

Much to my amazement he not only mentioned my talk on email filtering but also includes a photo of me. It's taken from a rather odd angle and before anyone asks, no I wasn't drinking beer while giving the talk!

You can read the article on their site here

Earlier this week Rob Burke from Microsoft got in touch with us about Asp.net AJAX extensions.

It transpires that none of the Irish hosting companies were offering support for them (at least not officially).

Although we hadn't been supporting it officially it transpires that we had been running them on several of our Windows servers since late last year when they were still in beta.

We like to embrace new technologies wherever we can (bearing in mind any possible negative side-effects, naturally) so we were delighted to be able to work with Rob in getting it all working. You can see a demo of the Asp.net AJAX extensions here:
AJAX test site

So we can now happily say that we do offer Asp.net AJAX extensions!

Further coverage on Rob's blog as well as a mention on Paul's.

We're pleased to announce that php5 is now available on our shared linux plans

The nitty gritty details:

PHP 5.2.0
MySQL 4.1.21

Any new servers will be installed with php5.

Due to compatibility / sanity issues we will NOT be upgrading existing servers to php5 at this time.

Combined with our domain name sale there's no better time to move your hosting and domains to Blacknight!!

If you need php5 for whatever reason you may contact our support team

It's that time of the year again!!

For the last couple of years we've either dropped our prices on domain names or run special offers.. This year is no different!

We're dropping prices across the board on all the popular domain extensions:

• IE domain prices slashed!! Register a new IE domain for a mere €35
• Transfer your existing IE domain for €30
• Co.uk domains - €4 / year!!
• EU domains - €9.99 / year

If your .ie domain is up for renewal with another registrar then you can save. Move your IE domains to Blacknight today for a mere €30!

The small print
All pricing is valid for the duration of the promotion and may not be combined with any other domain promotions.

As we've mentioned a couple of times over the last few months, we've been working hard behind the scenes on improvements to everything

So far we've upgraded a LOT of the server hardware on our shared network and increased the bandwidth allowances.

In order to make all that happen we joined INEX and RIPE. We then moved all our equipment and that of our clients onto our new IP space gradually, in order to avoid downtime and disruption.

Our network staff, having carefully planned the new network rollout, are installing new Cisco switches across the entire network.

What this means in plain English is that we're removing any possible bottlenecks on our internal network ie. between your sites / servers and the internet.

To do that we have to switch the network cables over from one set of switches to another. If only there was a magical way to do that on several hundred servers at once!

Our CTO, Paul Kelly, explains it as follows:

Are there up sides and down sides to this work? The answer to that question is very simple. Both.

Downsides:
We have to re-patch 5 cabinets worth of servers into new
infrastructure.

What does this mean?
Ok well we basically have all the new equipment in
place and configured and linked into the core network.
We have all the cabling ready to go.
All we have to do is pull out your old network cable and plug in the new one.

There may be some convergence times for mac addresses to appear on the
new port in the core of the network. This should be brief but could be
5-10 minutes for our less busy customers.

Upsides:
Well you will now be connected into one of the most modern
networks in the industry in Ireland today. We'd go so far to say it is
one of the best designed networks that any of us have come across. We
say this with pride as we've spent a lot of time, energy, money and a
lot of thinking to get it to this point.

We've enabled a feature called "portfast" on all customer ports so as
the time taken to negotiate the connection speed and detect if there is
a loop takes less than 3 seconds. So for the most part none of you will
notice anything.

We've increased resilience from all our equipment cabinets. What we mean
by this is that we've now got 2 x links into the core network, into
separate core access switches and we're using rapid spanning tree to
fail over from one to the other in the event of a switch failure.

We're also giving more aggregate bandwidth per customer cabinet. We used
to allow 100mbit per pair of switches. We're now going to allow 1Gigabit
from each cabinet into the core network and from there to the Internet!

Ok after reading all that you now need to know when this is happening.
We want to do it next Thursday the 25th of Jan 2007. We hope to start
around 9pm and finish by midnight. We don't want to rush things, we want
to verify as we go that customers are coming back up. For this reason we
are scheduling a 3 hour maintenance window 21:00 - 00:00.

A point to note: Most customers who have gone live in the last 12 months
will already be on the new network infrastructure and this maintenance
window should not affect them. However we're applying this to all customers
just in case we need to make any global changes to the network to
accommodate extra capacity or link failures.

So basically, as they say, "it's all good".

If anyone has any questions or queries please let us know.

I originally started drafting this post on our second day back in the office, but we've been so busy that it's only now that I've actually found the time to complete it. I guess that's good complaint to have

When I set up the first Blacknight website about 6 years ago I never thought we'd end up where we are now.

As I mentioned on my personal blog, we're now ranked as the second largest hosting company in Ireland according to both webhosting.info and IpWalk.

It's been a fascinating journey so far and we're nowhere near the end yet. (Yes I know that early version of the website is horrendous!!)

With the New Year comes new staff and plans for the following twelve months.....

Our latest appointment is George Pratt, who previously worked for one of our competitors.

George joins us with about ten years of sales experience in the IT industry and will be heading up our sales team (business development if you like that kind of jargon!).

With George's help we expect to roll out some new and exciting products and services over the next 12 months, so keep an eye out!

In the last quarter of 2006 we took on several new staff in accounts, technical support and programming.

By hiring our own programming staff we have been able to get quite a lot of backend work done including integration with the IEDR's new API system. The new API system allows us to send IE domain registration requests to the registry practically in realtime. While all registration requests still need to be manually checked and verified it reduces some of the workload for our staff. We intend to increase our integration with the IEDR and other registries over the coming months and will be working very closely with ModernGigabyte to this end.

In related news, we have recently acquired Noc Software and will be making a separate announcement about our plans for Noc Manager, which is an addon module for Modernbill.

We'll shortly be announcing details of some of our New Year specials.. We know you'll like them, but we have to make you wait a small bit longer

There was a comprehensive article on broadband in the Irish business & technology magazine Smart Company. While the article itself is extremely detailed and covers many of the issues that Irish consumers of broadband services may face that wasn't what caught my attention.

Slap bang in the middle of the article is a screenshot of the Irish ISP Test :)

Christmas is literally a week away today, so it's opportune to let you all know about our opening hours etc., during the holiday period.

Our offices will be closing this Thursday 21st December and will re-open on 2nd January 2007 at 9am.

We will be monitoring our support desk during the holiday period, so please feel free to use our help desk as normal.

Any dedicated / colocation clients are asked to use the out of hours contact numbers that they have been given.

The IE Domain Registry will be closed over the Christmas period, so if you need any DNS updates or other changes please get them to us ASAP, or you will have to wait until January ie. next year!!

From the entire team at Blacknight I'd like to take this opportunity to wish our clients, suppliers and partners a Happy Christmas and a peaceful New Year.

We look forward to doing business with you in 2007!

Watch this space for exciting special offers and other news ...........

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

We'll be in Cork tomorrow at the IT@Cork conference.

It looks like there could be an interesting line up, with a combination of both Irish and international speakers included in the day's lineup.

We'll also have stand, as we are one of the event's sponsors, so if you're down that way feel free to drop by

A number of our clients have reported receiving letters from a German company today called "Internet Register Ireland" which seems to be a trading name of DAD Deutscher Adressdienst GmbH.

The letter is nicely presented and includes a business reply envelope (all printed on recycled paper no less!).

See below for sample:

The issue arises in the smaller print at the bottom of the page.

If you sign and send in the letter you will be agreeing to pay them the sum of €958 for a "listing" on their "directory".

We would recommend clients to simply bin this letter.

You may remember a while back that I mentioned some of our network and hardware upgrades.

As our core network peers at INEX with a growing number of Irish ISPs we felt the time was right to upgrade bandwidth on all our shared hosting plans, so that's exactly what we've done.

Our entry level hosting plan, which comes in both linux and Windowsflavours, used to come with 5 Gb of transfer a month, so we've upped that to 15 Gb thus tripling the bandwidth allocation!

With our other plans we've doubled, tripled or even quadrupled the monthly bandwidth allocations, so whether you want to run a business website or a podcast you can do so without worrying about your bandwidth usage

You can simply choose the hosting plan that suits your needs depending on whether you want to use linux or Windows based hosting. If you pay your order online using credit card, PayPal or Laser your account will be activated within a few minutes.

And if you have any questions or queries we're here to help you !

Verisign, which manages the registry of .com and .net, have recently moved their platform over to use EPP.

While this is primarily a "backend" change it also affects both ourselves and our clients.

As you may be aware to transfer a .org, .info or .biz domain you need a special code or key. This is EPP in action.

For all .com and .net transfers from last weekend onwards you will need to provide the EPP key to initiate transfer.

Putting it more bluntly. No Key = no transfer.

Under ICANN rules registrars must supply the EPP information within 5 days of receiving a request for it. Most of the larger registrars will make the information readily available to clients from within their control panels or via their support desks.

If you have any queries about EPP please let us know

(If you are interested in learning more about the finer details of EPP, then you may wish to read RFC 3730)

I like us to get involved with interesting projects, so when Tom Raftery asked us if we'd be interested in sponsoring the It@Cork conference this year I was interested.

Rather than merely shoving our name on the sponsors' list we're actually sponsoring the pre-conference podcast series, where Tom will be speaking to some of the speakers that will be in Cork in November.

The first interview is with Jeff Nolan and is well worth listening to either on your pc or mp3 player!

If you have been nominated for a Net Visionary Award this year you can now put a tasty logo on your website or blog.

(The sponsors haven't been left out either, as you can see from the main page of this blog.)

Adding the logo to your blog is quite easy. In my case I am using Wordpress for my personal blog, so I added it the theme's sidebar (sidebar.php).

Simply download the logo that corresponds with the category (or categories) that you have been nominated for from the IIA website. In most browsers you simply right click and choose "save as".

If you are using Wordpress for your blog you can either edit the template file via your browser (if the permissions are correct) or you can download the file to your computer and edit it there.

The HTML code you need to add could be as follows:

<a href="http://www.netvisionary.ie/votenom.html"><img alt="Net Visionary 2006 Nominee" src="http://blog.blacknight.ie/images/award06_nominee_blogger.jpg" width="133" height="214" /></a>

Just ensure that the "img src" part points to the correct location for the image you are using.

In the example code above the nominee logo is for "best blogger" which would display like this:

Don't forget - voting is open to everyone and you don't need to be a member of the IIA to vote.

We'll be letting all our clients know about this really cool special offer later today, but I thought I'd give our blog readers the inside track first.

Blacknight in partnership with SpreadShirt is offering free upgrades to the premium SpreadShirt shops. This upgrade will save you €60!!

Spreadshirt is an online platform that allows you to easily design and sell tshirts and other merchandise from your website or blog. In fact you don't even need a website to use it!

You can easily upload your own designs and add them to high quality tshirts, sweaters and even underwear.

To avail of the special offer you need to sign up to SpreadShirt through our website if you haven't done so already.

Once you have a spreadshirt account setup through us simply follow the link on our signup page to upgrade your account and use the special code reserved for Blacknight clients "BLACKNIGHTMERCH"
Within about 24 hours your account should be upgraded to a premium one which gives you a range of new options including:

• Banner free shop - no brand dilution


• Limited edition tool - create exclusive or limited run items


• Data export options


• Discount coupons


• Translate your shop into 11 languages

So what are you waiting for? Sign up for a Spreadshirt account today and start selling custom tshirts and other merchandise

NB The coupon code and upgrade will only work for spreadshirt accounts that were created from the Blacknight signup page. The coupon code is valid until the 3rd January 2006. Please ensure that the upgrade coupon has worked and that you have not been charged for the upgrade, as we will not be held responsible for any charges.

We are proud sponsors of the Irish Internet Association Net Visionary Awards again this year.

This year's awards sees the introduction of two new categories that reflect the growing popularity of the media in question - namely blogging and podcasting.

Here at Blacknight we're passionate about new technologies, so it's little surprise that several of our clients have been nominated.

Best of luck to all the nominees this year, as I can see that some of the categories are going to be hotly contested.

NB: Voting is open to everyone - you DO NOTneed to be a member of the IIA.

At the end of last week our technical team sent out a notification to a group of clients to forewarn them of a pending IP renumbering.

As this kind of thing is quite technical I thought people might appreciate a more detailed explanation.

The explanation will include technical information, but hopefully it will be easier to understand from a non-technical point of view.

If anything is unclear please feel free to post a comment asking for clarification - that's why this blog is here !!

Earlier this year we joined both Inex and RIPE.

Inex is the Irish Internet Neutral Exchange. Basically what that means is that ISPs are able to "meet" there and swap traffic. In practical terms that means that the way your website or server is connected to users is affected.

For example, we now peer with Eircom. If you are using an Eircom DSL or dialup connection you are "closer" to your website and email

To see this in action do a traceroute from your computer to your website and you’ll see how many “hops” it has to take. If you need a reasonable comparison compare a traceroute from your desktop to irishisptest.com, which is on our Dublin network with one to nytimes.com, which is in the US.

The IP renumbering is a result of our joining RIPE and becoming a LIR (Local Internet Registry).
What this means for us is that we have become our own ISP. We now get our IP addresses directly from RIPE (a governing body for IP addresses in the EMEA) and we will never have to change them ever again.
Previously we got them from our ISP (bandwidth provider) and if we wanted to change ISP we had to give them back, which meant doing what we are doing now. Unfortunately this means that every time we changed ISP we'd have to do this change over, which is confusing and painful for both us and our clients.
Now we can pick and choose our ISP's and basically just advertise our Ips to them and to the internet and it all works automatically.

This means that we can also plan and allocate our network more efficiently.

Most of our dedicated and colocation clients have already been moved to the new network while the migration of all the shared linux and windows server 2003 hosting accounts is almost finished.

We also have the opportunity to offer new and exciting technologies to our clientele at various levels… Watch this space to see more

In terms of our hardware we have also started work on upgrading all of our shared hosting servers from unbranded servers to Dell Xeons and HPs.

The new servers we are putting in have bigger hard drives, faster CPUs and more RAM, which has allowed us to greatly expand our hosting plans. Our entry level hosting plans are no longer “entry level”, as they now come with a generous 500 MB of disk space (equivalent to 347 floppy disks!) and 5 gigabytes of transfer per month. Combine that will all the other powerful features and the ability to host up to 4 sites on a hosting account and you get a really excellent combination.

If you have any queries about any of this please let us know.

The Irish Internet Association is organising a half day seminar in conjunction with Carlow County Enterprise Board.

As the event is taking place in Carlow it's only natural that we should be involved

The schedule for the afternoon is as follows:
2.00-2.15: Registrations

2.15-2.30: Welcome and Introductions, CEO Carlow CEB

2.30-3.00: Quality Web Design to drive customers to your site - John Mitchell, Strata3

3.00-3.30: Getting your Website spec and design right for your business - Michele Neylon, Blacknight Solutions

3.30-4.00: Generate Sales Leads Online - Fergal O’Byrne, CEO IIA

4.00-4.15: Panel Q&A

4.15-4.30: Carlow SME Showcase

4.30-5.00: Networking

As you can see I've been asked to give a talk on speccing a website for your business, so if anyone has any particular thoughts they'd like to share now is the time to let me know

If you are interested in coming along let the IIA know

I'll be down in Cork next Saturday for Bar Camp which looks like it could be an interesting event.

Looking at the list of attendees and speakers I recognise quite a few familiar names so it will be nice to actually meet a few of them "in real life".

If anyone wants to say "hi" just keep an eye out for me...

We're also exhibiting this week at the World Ploughing Championships in Tullow, Co. Carlow.

Paul and his team have been working on putting together some interesting demos etc., to liven up the stand.

I don't think I've ever really been to a ploughing championship, so I've no idea what to expect!

We have received a number of phone calls in the past 24 - 48 hours regarding a domain name scam.

A UK company, European Domain Solutions, has been ringing Irish businesses to scare them into registering domain names. They will try to charge you upwards of £150 per domain (over €200!) to register the domains, which is several times what we charge.

If you are contacted by any UK companies offering domain names or trying to persuade you to register domain names please be careful. This kind of scam happens every few months and costs companies money that they could have invested elsewhere.

The kind of line they will use is that a 3rd party has contacted them wanting to register a domain name that is closely linked to your business.

They will offer to "protect" you for a "nominal" fee.

A sample email that one client received is below (identifying details have been removed):

With reference to our telephone conversation regarding an unrelated party wishing to register :-

www.somename.com
www.somename.net
www.somename.eu

The prices are as follows:-

For a 5 year registration: £150 per name (£30 per annum)

For a 10 year registration: £250 per name (£25 per annum)

Included in the package you will have unlimited e-mail facilities if you so wish, we would interlink the names into your current web site or if at any point you wanted to put web pages behind the names we would give you all the web space with full technical support to host that site for the duration of the registration.

At the end of the registration period you will be invited to renew automatically. Registrations will prevent the third party using your company name on the internet or moving on to another registrar without consulting yourselves.

Please contact me as soon as possible on +44 (0)870 XXX XXXX

Kindest Regards

If you want to hear a bit more about our new Ruby On Rails offering then you may be interested in our first podcast interview with Mario from PR Web.

It's available in mp3, iTunes and Ogg.

Here at Blacknight we like to keep our "finger on the pulse" of the web development world.

We are also proud to innovate, which is why we are often the first company to introduce new technologies to the Irish market:
- Spam filtering
- PHP 5
- UML hosting

to name but a few

This time round it's Ruby On Rails, which has to be simply the coolest technology to emerge in the last couple of years.

Before releasing it to the public we have been asking experienced web developers to test it for us... They seem to be happy, so we think it's time to let you be the judge.

So without further ado:
We're proud to announce the immediate availability of Ruby On Rails on all our linux hosting plans. (all new signups will have immediate access - other servers will be enabled over the coming days)

To make it as simple as possible for you our Ruby on Rails hosting is integrated into our web hosting control panel. You can simply control your applications and configure them straight from within the control panel.

Have fun!

I thought you might be interested in our limited time special offer on IE domains.

This offer will only run from today, Friday August 11th 2006 until Monday 14th August 2006.

It may not be combined with any other special offers or reductions!

Simply use the coupon code "friday" when placing your order online for a .ie registration or transfer and you will get a €5 discount.

That's right, using this coupon you will pay only €35 to transfer your .ie domain to us, while new registrations will cost you a mere €40 (all prices ex-vat)

Please bear in mind that any IE domain registration requests must follow the IEDR rules and guidelines, so please ensure that you have the required documentation, such as your CRO number, ready when ordering.

NB: This offer only applies to orders placed on our website. This offer does not apply to telephone orders.

Don't forget we also offer excellent value on other domain names, with .com domains for a mere €8.25.

We also offer the widest range of international domains, so no matter which market you want to speak to we can help you achieve your goals.

Have you already started selling cool tshirts via your website?

If you haven't, then get to it!

Our partners Spreadshirt have produced a number of tools to cater to the more advanced users. You can download tools and code over on the new SpreadShirt Developer zone.

We'll be announcing a special offer from our partner very soon - so keep an eye on your inbox and subscribe to this blog's feed!

If your site can't be found easily, then it might as well not exist.

A couple of months ago I posted a couple of tips on search engine optimisation (SEO) which you may have found useful.

To supplement this we've now added a set of SEO tools to our linux hosting control panel:

Simply click on the link and it will take you to the seo tools page.

The tools available include a range of features to help you and include a "spider check" which will give you a search engine's view of your site, submission tools and rank checking.

Feedback, as always, is welcome.

Here at Blacknight we are passionate about blogs and blogging, or at least I am

As more and more companies embrace blogging and RSS to keep people up to date with their latest happenings the number of RSS feeds you may end up reading just keeps on growing.

A year ago I probably tracked ten or fifteen blogs on a regular basis and I only subscribed to the feeds of one or two. Nowadays I find myself tracking a much larger number, while my RSS subscription folder in Thunderbird just keeps on growing.

Services like Feedburner make it a lot easier for both bloggers and their readers to keep track of what's going on, while FeedBlitz offers you the option to get email updates as well.

Of course the biggest problem these days is finding blogs that are worth reading.

So where can you begin?

If you are interested in finding out what other Irish bloggers are saying then you could have a look at some of the Irish blog sites:

• Irish Bloggers - over 300 Irish blogs sorted by category and popularity


• IrishBlogs.ie - aggregates a large number of Irish blogs


• Planet - another aggregator


• Technorati - the "big daddy" of blog search engines

No matter what your area of interest you are sure to find a blog to suit your taste!

PS: You can now subscribe to this blog via both Feedburner and FeedBlitz!!

We've added MS SQL 2005 support to select windows server 2003 hosting plans.

You can choose to setup MS SQL 2000 or MS SQL 2005 databases with any of the following hosting plans:

• Standard Windows


• Professional Windows


• Enterprise WIndows

Our Windows Server 2003 hosting plans now come with support for the following technologies:

• Asp
• Asp.net
• Asp.net 2.0
• Php 4 AND Php 5
• My SQL 4
• MS SQL 2000
• MS SQL 2005
• Perl 5

So what are you waiting for?

And don't forget... you can save 15% if you move from another hosting provider to Blacknight.

Here at Blacknight we are passionate about the internet and technology and we love being able to share that passion with you, our clients and partners.

Over the last year there has been a lot of "buzz" surrounding a new scripting language - Ruby On Rails.

RoR describes itself as being aimed at providing "programmer happiness" so we'd like to know what you think.

We are currently beta testing Ruby On Rails on our linux hosting platform, so if you would like to give it a go please contact our sales team. We'll be giving away (yes - for free!) a number of hosting accounts and domain names to let people get "down and dirty" with this new language.

EDIT:

Just to clarify what we are giving away:

• Hosting - SoHo linux


• Domains - Choice of .com or .eu or co.uk

EDIT

We've had a tremendous response to the offer and have given away a number of .eu and .com domains throughout the day.

As part of our ongoing upgrades and improvements we are delighted to announce support for two new technologies:

Php 5 (version 5.1.4) on Windows Server 2003

and

ColdFusion 7 on Windows Server 2003 also.

Both of these new options are available via the Helm hosting control panel for our Windows 2003 server clients.

With php, for example, it works in a similar fashion to the asp.net settings - you simply choose which version you want to use and off you go

We've always tried to pass on savings to our clients where possible.

Earlier this year we offered IE domains for a mere € 30 as a special offer, while we consistently charge one of the most competitive prices in the Irish market.

We're now upgrading ALL of our shared hosting plans on both Windows 2003 server and Linux.

All package quotas have been increased, so you will get "more bang for your buck".

Take our Soho Linux plan for example.

It now comes with the following features:

• 500 MB fast disk space
• 5 GB monthly transfer
• Host up to 4 sites on the one account
• 2 MySQL databases
• 200 pop3 accounts
• PHP 4 & Perl 5
• Free web stats (Webalizer / Awstats)
• Free site builder
• Irish based servers

All new hosting accounts are on Dell Xeon servers on our Inex peered network.

Although Alexa may not be the most accurate barometer of a website's popularity it does give some indication.
The only reason I mention this is because not one, but two of our company websites are currently in the top 100 for Ireland.

Both our main website and Irish ISP Test are listed at the 69th and 77th positions respectively

As co-sponsors of the Irish Internet Association's annual conference, which is to be held this year in the Fitzpatrick Castle Hotel, Killiney on May 25th, we're looking forward to seeing some of you on the day.

This year's lineup includes speakers from some of the most important online companies, not only in Ireland, but globally!

Although the full schedule hasn't been finalised the provisional one includes Yahoo!, Google, MSN, eBay and Bebo, so it should be quite informative.

If you're not already a member of the IIA then I'd encourage you to join now

I'll be giving a talk on Open Source software in business at the ICT Expo next Friday, 5th May, 2006 in the RDS.

The talk is part of a series being organised by Open Ireland in collaboration with ILUG that will run over the course of the two day event.

The talk is officially entitled:
Linux and some of its friends in the enterprise

Linux and its Gnu/other friends in the enterprise, introducing several ways that this flexible system can be exploited within the enterprise. Here there will be a talk on the use of databases, email, appropriate content on the network be that servers or on the desktop. This space is so broad but we have managed to extract from the field just a few gems.

So you can expect to hear about a very wide range of topics crammed into a very short period of time

At Blacknight we use a combination of both Open Source solutions and proprietary ones to run not only our core systems but many aspects of our business interaction with our clients. As a business we do not have the luxury of making decisions based purely on philosophy. We have to make the right choice in order to deliver the best solution to our clients and partners at all times.

This weekend is a long weekend for Easter, so our offices will be closing until Tuesday morning.

If you have any support queries over the weekend please use our helpdesk - support@blacknight.ie and have a good weekend!

The last few weeks have seen a lot of activity chez Blacknight, so we may have forgotten to tell you all about some of our new additions, such as our latest special offer

We're currently running a special offer on Windows server 2003 based hosting

Up until now we've been offering Linux hosting and Windows hosting at the same price. For the duration of this offer we have slashed the pricing on all our Windows 2003 based hosting plans, so that Windows hosting is now actually cheaper than Linux!

If you combine our starter hosting plan (Soho) for € 30 ex-VAT with a .com domain you can be up and running for under €50!

That's less than 13 cents a day for a full website and email solution backed with our professional technical support!

So what are you waiting for?

You can signup securely online 24/7/365

We are pleased to announce the launch of the new podcasting channel on ENN in association with PodLeaders.

Tom Raftery, who has built up a reputation as one of Ireland's foremost podcasters, has been running a series of high profile interviews on podleaders.com for the last few months.

Past interviewees have included Vint Cerf, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, Michael Arrington, Steve Rubel, Shel Israel and many others.

We have just migrated our speed test site to our new network which peers at INEX, the Irish Internet Neutral Exchange.

The site allows Irish internet users check their download, upload and roundtrip speeds for free, while also allowing them to track up to ten previous tests.

The new connectivity means that the site is now "closer" to users of most of the major Irish ISPs:

• Esat


• Eircom


• IBB


• Digiweb


• Netsource


• Smart


• Microsoft


• Clearwire


• Magnet


• Heanet


• Hosting365

We have received a number of calls this week related to a new domain scam.

While most domain scams are related to .com domains, this recent one is targetting owners of IE domains only.

The caller, who identifies himself as "Steve" and gave a Dublin number, claims to be from the IEDR or possibly "the domain registry".

If you are contacted by anyone claiming from to be from the "registry" DO NOT give them your credit card details.

Throughout the year the Irish Internet Association is organising a series of events covering a range of topics related to the internet industry.

On 12 April they are organising a half-day event covering blogging and podcasting. Brian Greene from Doop will be giving a talk on podcasting, while I will be giving one on blogging.

Where?
Engineers Ireland Headquarters, 22 Clyde Road, Ballsbridge
When?
12 April 2006 9:30
Cost?
Fee is €50 for IEI/IIA members and €65 for non-members

Today is a national holiday in Ireland and we would like to wish all our clients and suppliers a very happy and peaceful day.

Needless to say our support desk will still be manned throughout the festivities, although our office will be closed

The Irish Internet Association, of which we are members, is organising a series of debates this year.

The first debate is on the motion:The Internet is Crap and will not survive !

Needless to say I'll be opposing the motion as will my team mates.

Full details of the event are on the IIA site here, while the event also received some coverage in Silicon Republic today

Last night I had the pleasure of being at the inaugaral Irish Blog Awards in the Alexander hotel.

As I mentioned previously we were sponsoring the awards, so I had the honour of handing over the iPod Nano to Damien Mulley, the event organiser.

So who got to walk away with the awards?

Damien has published a full list on the official site, while there are plenty of photos from the event available on Flickr

Big thanks to Damien for all his hard work and let's hope we get to do it all again next year

As some of you may know, this Saturday sees the inaugaral Irish Blog Awards taking place in the Alexander Hotel in Dublin.

Here at Blacknight we love blogs, or maybe it's just my own personal bias :)

In any case we are delighted to be one of the sponsor's of the event and will be giving away a black iPod Nano to a lucky blogger (we're also giving free hosting and other goodies to nominees).

Damien Mulley, who is the driving force behind this year's event, was interviewed with Rick O'Shea, MC for the night, on the Dave Fanning show this evening and gave us a lovely plug.

Thanks Damien!

As I am giving a talk tomorrow on blogging for the IIA I thought it was time to "take the plunge" and put the "official" Blacknight blog online.

Our overworked webmaster will be "skinning" it to fit in with the rest of the company websites, so if you are still viewing a basic install of Movable Type then come back again in a few days.

So what will this blog be about?

As the official voice of the company you can expect to see:

• Company News
• Special Offers
• Articles on relevant technology
• Tips and tricks

Of course as this is a blog you will be able to comment on our entries and make suggestions etc.,