Hosting: April 2006 Archives

If you are interested in talking about domain names then maybe the new TalkDomains.eu site may be of interest :) A lot of the existing domain discussion forums have a US focus, while this forum will hopefully cater more to the European market. As always feedback is welcome

Google's website builder - Google Page Creator - is accepting signups again, as long as you have a gmail account. The user interface is simple and quite intuitive, though it is obviously limited in its functionality. Some of the AJAX tricks they've used to make it all work are pretty nifty and really fast! Unlike some of the other site builders I've tried over the last couple of years, this one works perfectly in Firefox, so I presume it will work equally as well in Internet Explorer. If the CSS hacks in the stylesheet are anything to go by it is probably as cross-browser as possible. I put a couple of pages online very quickly just to test it (don't expect a work of art - you'll be sorely disappointed!) While you can customise the first part of the page title you seem to be stuck with a default string for the second part. The title tag contains: The bolded section is the part that you are currently able to customise. Other shortcomings I found in my quick experiment:

• Navigation - if this is aimed at novices helping them to give meaningful navigation to their "sites" is a must
• Repeat Elements - Footers on most websites are uniform throughout the site. This new "toy" doesn't allow for this.

Of course the obvious question has to be asked... Who exactly is this aimed at and what is the business model? If it is aimed at non-technical people then it is moving in the right direction, but it still has quite a bit to go.... Or is Google trying to move into the hosting space? Would this explain its ICANN accreditation ? Will we soon see Google Hosting competing against Yahoo! et al?

ICANN are looking for people to fill a number of roles:

* Three members of the ICANN Board of Directors * One member of the Council of the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) * One member of the Council of the Country-Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO) * Two members of the At Large Advisory Committee (ALAC)

Further details on the ICANN site

The Data Retention Directive has been published in the Official Journal. (You can download a copy of the directive here in PDF format.) This means that "the clock" has started ticking .... Over the next few months ISPs and other vested interests will be doing their utmost to make sense of the text and see what impact it will have on their business What bothers me about all this is that there are a large number of Irish hosting "companies" who seem to think that this kind of legislation does not apply to them as they do not either own hardware or manage their network - preferring instead to use cheap servers based in the US. Sorry boys - but the minister will probably be contacting you all about this too.

No matter who you ask the number of speculative registrations during both sunrise and landrush for .eu was obviously high. Eurid has stuck its head in the sand and is claiming that the trademark laws were at fault not them. No matter what went on in the lead up to landrush one thing is sure - the domain aftermarket is booming. Sedo, which is one of the largest domain brokers, has over 36 thousand EU domains listed. While some of them are not legitimate listings (ie. none of the pending applications has been accepted by Eurid) that is still a high number so short after the landrush. So are all these registrations likely to stick? This could be a moot point, as the .es registry was forced to rollback a large number that were snapped up on opening and that was a ccTLD not a regional TLD. It's pity that the ADR site doesn't have an RSS feed .............

The EU registry opens to the public today at 11am CET Whether .eu will take off or become another .info or .biz is hard to say at this juncture, but there should be plenty of "fun and games" over the next few weeks as the ADR procedures take place

I've been following the marketing antics of some of our industry competitors closely. Some marketing ploys are quite interesting and in some cases even innovative, however there are some techniques that I find almost laughable A particular competitor seems to be having serious issues with their maths or maybe their comprehension of the English language.. To be honest, I'm not 100% sure. According to this particular company they have X thousand clients, however any statistics that I have seen would show that they do not have anything close to that number of clients, while they may host DNS for that number of domains. So why are they inflating their figures?