Recently in Domains & Hosting Category

One of the hot topics that will be under discussion at the upcoming ICANN meeeting in Paris will be the introduction of new TLDs.

I've mentioned a few of the campaigns previously on my domain blog (expect more activity on there while I'm at ICANN!)

So how many new TLDs will there be?
How many applicants can we expect to see?

I had been thinking about the entire thing a small bit over the last year, but Anthony Van Couvering decided to go one step further and conducted an informal poll

He emailed a group of people from within the domain industry, including myself, and asked us what we thought. The numbers and comments are quite diverse, but based on the conversations I've been privy to, they're hardly surprising.

Hosting365 have announced that they've sold Register365, which is their shared hosting and domains business to Namesco a UK provider.

So now Ireland's largest provider is no longer Irish. According to the press release Hosting365 are going to focus on their managed services.

What does that mean for the Irish hosting market?

It could be interesting times ahead, as Novara was already swallowed up by Irish Telco Digiweb earlier this year.

Are there more acquistions and sales in the pipeline?

I'm always amazed at the silly / insane / nonsensical junk that comes out of some companies and organisations.

Enterprise Ireland seem to be funding a Template Monster clone, which is linked into Digiweb. Why should tax payers be paying for another Eoin Costello project? If it's commercially viable shouldn't it be able to stand on its own two feet? And does the world really need another template monster?
Why would anyone in their right mind pay that kind of money for a such a horrific "design" when so many free site building tools would do as good a job if not better?

Ammado are a very odd business. Judging by what people have been saying this morning it looks like they spammed quite a few bloggers this morning (Justin Mason, Donncha O Caoimh and Damien Mulley that I know of). I have an account with them, so while I thought the email looked dodgy I wasn't going to complain to them formally.

Twitter has been down more than up over the last few days. If anyone wants an invite to jaiku I have a few.. If you want to see what people are blathering about check out Twit.ie (love the name!) which pulls in the latest posts from both jaiku and twitter from an ever growing list of Irish based users.


UPDATE: Justin has blogged about Ammado and also points out that they're signed up to Habeas!

UPDATE 2: Someone from Ammado has posted an "apology" in the comments on Justin's blog. I'm beginning to see a pattern emerging here..

UPDATE 3 - Looks like quite a few people weren't that impressed with being "targetted" by Ammado: Alexia, Maman Poulet, Damien,

I'm back in the office this morning and trying to catch up on emails etc.,

If you've emailed me in the last week or so and haven't got a reply now you know why :)

Of course if your email didn't have a semantic subject line I probably won't find it ever - sorry!

I've also got a bit tired of clients being negatively affected by Wordpress' dumb caching (or simple lack of it!) which has led to this.

All I'll say is this. When this site made it onto the frontpage of Digg the server barely flinched. If I'd been using a default install of Wordpress the site would have taken out the entire server...

It looks like Bebo.ie is returning to its rightful owners!

Couple of quick notes....

I've finally put some content on a subdomain off technology.ie. I've setup some forums there to take over from a now defunct forum I was running... Why? Well the old domain name wasn't particularly "strong" so using a more generic domain may work out better. Of course I could be completely wrong, but experiments like this are fun !

On a completely unrelated topic ...

The annual Blacknight sale hasn't been announced to the public yet but will be later today. To find out about the special reductions and possibly win a prize you'll need to be either a Blacknight client OR a subscriber to the Blacknight newsletter. More details and signup here

Just back in the office this morning after my trip to LA, so I'm trying to wade through the email and snail mail that built up in my absence.

We've extended the EU domain offer, so you can still get a doteu domain for a mere 5 euro!