Hosting: July 2005 Archives

Eircom are RFC compliant in that they accept regarding abuse complaints sent to abuse@eircom.net HOWEVER they do not seem to process input to that address

A news item on Netcraft points to a Eurid public statement regarding the new .eu TLD.

One of the things that has always frustrated me was that there were no hosting resource sites for the Irish market only

John had posted some interesting statistics based on his crawling of the IE namespace:

Websites With Title, Keywords and Description: 10460

That's out of a corpus of 36198 domains!! So, if John's stats are true, and I have no reason to doubt him, approximately 66% of Irish websites have no meta content. Some SEO experts may say that meta content is not as important as it used to be, however they would surely agree that TITLE tags are a necessity. Others would also opt in favour of using all available meta content, as it can help with your listing in some cases. From reviewing sites submitted to browse.ie, search.ie and translationresearch.com I would have to agree. In the case of the two Irish directories the quality of submissions is quite poor. If they were being submitted to Skaffe , where I am also an editor, they would either be rejected or pushed between editors until the titles and descriptions had been beaten into an acceptable shape. A lot of the Irish sites submitted are completely lacking in title tags, or all pages share the same ones, which is almost as bad. As John points out, there is a definite need for SEO professionals in the Irish market. I wonder are people willing to pay them though....

Market research is an important exercise. You should know:

• What people have
• What people would like to have
• What people need (not the same as above)
• What is on offer (in the market)
• How it is offered

There's probably a more scientific way of presenting those ideas, but you should get the general idea. In the hosting market it is not uncommon to contact competitors to seek quotes for various services simply to see how other people are presenting their services and products. After all, when it boils down to it, a domain is still a domain. You can call it what you like, but it's not going to change what it is. I was rather amused, but slightly bemused, when we received two almost identical RFPs in the space of 12 hours. One arrived. I read it and was dealing with it. When the second one arrived I was hit with a sense of deja vu. Hadn't I read the same request only a couple of hours earlier? Maybe I was imagining things. No. I wasn't. Putting them side by side the only differences were minor punctuation and stylistic differences (3 or 4 elements to be precise). Smelling a rat I checked the headers, as did a couple of our technical staff. You would think that they'd have at least tried to hide their origin. Nope. The IP in the header was the competitor's office mail server, with customised SMTP flag and all!! Moral of the story. Don't send emails to competitors from your office IP.

Over the course of the last few years I have dealt with a wide range of ICANN registrars and their resellers.
Some experiences have been good, some fantastic and some excruciatingly painful.

Which ones stick out?

The bad ones of course!

It is a well known fact that people remember bad service and, more importantly, talk about it more than they do about good service.

About a year ago we were given the opportunity to signup with Directi and get cheap domains.

There was a full API and all the other "gizmos" and the price was almost too good to be true (especially if you look at the ICANN rates).

I should have known better.

I've always been a strong believer in the "you pay for what you get" philosophy, and with DirectI you will get cheap domains - definitely.

Just try actually managing them!

And please oh please, do not even try to open a support query.

You stand a 10% chance of getting a relevant reply on a good day.

The web interface is obviously your main point of contact to manage your domains. You'd expect it to be accessible, or is that too much to ask?

Problems:

• API - the slightest typo throws it out and certain fields that shouldn't be compulsory are
• Transfers - they have a tendency of vanishing
• Support - non-existent or simply irrelevant replies to queries
• Management - impossible to actually manage all domains in your account
• Buggy - we've ended up with domains being split between multiple accounts ie. ours and that of a competitor. Directi cannot explain these discrepancies
• Gateway support - they added 2checkout but ONLY for US dollar! The 2checkout API works with multiple currencies, why exclude clients?
• Uptime - Both the web interface and the gateway "vanish" from time to time. Haven't they heard of load-balancing?

When we initially moved our billing over to using Modernbill one of the things that bothered me was the lack of support for Directi. Now I am really happy that they do not support it.

The number of issues we have had with their interface and API, without even mentioning issues sub-resellers ran into, far outweigh any price advantage.

Domain registration can and should be an automated process for CNOIB domains.

Each manual intervention has a direct impact on margins.

Each manual edit takes time, so costs you money.

If you have the choice between a system that "just works" and gives you real technical support when you need it and a system that malfunctions but "saves" you a few cents, which one would you choose? I know my answer.

According to Netcraft a number of hosting companies are banning the use of phpbb. Considering the number of security issues that the open source bulletin board software has had in the last 8 months, this move is not particularly surprising. However, as a spokesperson for the developers rightly pointed out:

While phpBB has and no doubt will continue to suffer from exploits (show me a piece of software that doesn't!) we have consistently addressed such issues very quickly

Although this may be true it is also an obvious source of headaches for hosting companies. Some control panel software, such as cpanel is capable of upgrading existing installs on servers automatically, however this will only work if:

• You have configured it to do so
• The install has not been customised beyond recognition
• The script was installed via cpanel and not manually

In the world of shared hosting it is impossible to maintain complete control over every single script that users install. To do so would add an unwieldy administrative overhead. So what can hosts do? Banning phpbb is an option in some cases, but it's hardly a viable one. It is far too popular to simply turn off. Unlike form to mail scripts, phpbb is not easily replaced with an alternative, as so many users would rely on hacks and tweaks that only work with it. Interestingly enough both Netcraft and the phpbb team fail to cite any examples of hosts banning the scripts usage, so you could consider the headline almost anecdotal

Ireland is supposedly a Catholic country and I suppose it has managed to retain some of its "moral values". Possibly more than other countries, although I doubt if all Irish people would subscribe as heartily to this ethos in the privacy of their own homes as they might like people to believe in public. A couple of weeks ago a new TLD specifically for the adult industry was approved by ICANN - .xxx (hardly the most inventive of TLD denominations, but at least its intended audience is clearly defined). Irish legislation is heavily influenced by Catholic and Christian values and anybody who denies that need only look to the Constitution to realise the error of their beliefs. That this is the case is not surprising, nor is it an exception. Other states have similar influences on their legislature. It is only countries, such as France, that have managed to truly separate Church and State (or more correctly Church from State). For a number of reasons the topic of adult content in the Irish context has arisen a few times in the last few weeks, both in my conversations with industry colleagues and in more public fora. Fergus Cassidy's most recent column makes reference to one of the IEDR's more bizarre naming policies: 3.4: The proposed domain name must not be offensive or contrary to public policy or generally accepted principles of morality. (see http://www.iedr.ie/NamingPolicy.php) Irish law is based on common law principles, which means that the law is more than the statute books, but a combination of statutes, case law, precedent and interpretation. It is not uncommon, therefore, to find tracts of "law" that leave a lot to be desired in terms of precision. However, laws governing the state should not be confused with rules governing the registration of domain names. Ambiguity and subjectivity are problematic and should be avoided. Up until the late 90s it was not possible to buy a copy of Playboy magazine legally in Ireland. In early 1992 there was a major scandal surrounding the distribution of contraceptives on Irish university campuses. It is now 2005. What has changed? A lot. Most newsagents stock Playboy and similar magazines in plain view, albeit on the top shelf. Subscribers to Sky and other services can receive premium adult channels that leave little to the imagination. Yet you cannot register porn.ie or hope to find an Irish hardcore website hosted in Ireland. (Playboy.ie is registered by the way, though hustler.ie isn't) Why is that? I know that we as a company would have problems if we were to host adult content on our network, but probably not from a legal point of view. It would be more likely to cause issues with some of our other clients. What exactly is the legislation covering this area? It's not too clear, and when I say that I am probably being generous. This lack of clarity is problematic to say the least. Although as a company I would not be in favour of us hosting hardcore porn or anything that could be interpreted as such, it would be preferable if the actual boundaries were defined clearly. There have been discussions of this issue in the past, but they have all led nowhere, as the actual legislation itself is hard to follow. For example, there are a couple of articles online that may act as starting points: http://www.siliconweb.ie/webtalk/020899.shtml http://www.ispai.ie/press.htm However the articles are very old, and are not exactly comprehensive. If anybody has any more recent legal references I would love to see them.