I’ve been off on holiday for the last couple of weeks, and as usual my return to the office this morning has resulted in an inbox full of messages and an RSS reader full of interesting articles.
My effort to catch up on all the interesting news and posts from my favourite sites is largely in vain (there’s too much to read and too many other important things to do), but here are a few domain-related items that caught my eye:
So what other interesting stuff have I missed? Leave a comment to let me know.
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This one’s important for anyone who owns a domain ending in .web.com which they control through a 123-reg account. (The information below only applies to domains ending in .web.com - all other .com domains are completely unaffected.)
As of later today (March 31), .web.com domains will cease to resolve. This means any website located at an address ending in .web.com will be unreachable at that address. We’re really sorry about this: unfortunately the issue is out of our control.
Why this is happening
All web.com domains purchased through 123-reg are administrated by an organisation called CentralNic. CentralNic does not actually own .web.com but agreed to operate the registry for domains ending in .web.com in good faith, based on the fact that the owners of web.com had managed it themselves for the preceding 6 years. Read the rest of this entry »
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We’ve been chatting about an interesting story in the office this morning: the Scottish National Party wants to establish a top level domain (TLD) for Scotland. The story has been covered by the Times and over on Circle ID.
The proposal is being driven by dotSCO (surely they’ve missed a trick by not going for the snappier ‘dotSCOT’?), an organisation which seems to have been around since at least 2005, judging by this news story. They hit the headlines over the weekend because the Scottish National Party, led by Scotland’s First Minister, Alex Salmond, has lent its support to the campaign.
According to the report in the Times, Alex Salmond is set to ”lodge a formal request with the American-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is responsible for allocating all internet domain names.” Read the rest of this entry »
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123-reg has become the first .uk tag holder to amass over a million domains on a single tag.
What does this mean? Well, essentially, we’re now responsible for the management of over a million domain names which end in .uk. They’re all owned by our customers - that’s you, if you’ve ever bought a .uk domain from us or transferred one in. We take care of them.
Tag holders
To explain further, tag holders are organisations that can process domain registrations through Nominet, the .uk registry. Every tag holder gets its own unique IPS tag to identify them. Ours is 123-REG.
Nominet has confirmed that the 123-REG tag is the first to have over a million .uk domains underneath it. We passed this figure a few weeks back, though because of the way the system operates with transfers in and out happening frequently, we can’t be entirely sure which domain was the millionth.
We’re really pleased to have hit this milestone - and think that part of the reason we got there first is because of the level of domain control we give everyone through their control panel:
- Control where your email goes by changing MX records.
- Make sure anyone typing in your domain name ends up in the right place by pointing the A records at any IP address.
- Change your nameservers to whatever you want.
- Update the registrant details.
- Alter CNAME and WWW records.
We’re one of the only places you can get that level of control - and you can change everything yourself, directly through the 123-reg control panel.
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As you might know, 123-reg has a parent company. Until earlier this week, the parent company was called Pipex Communications Ltd. However, on Tuesday it changed its name to GX Networks.
The reason the name has changed is that Pipex Broadband, which also used to be a part of our company, was sold to Tiscali last year.
The change isn’t actually a big one. For us it’s meant having to find where we mention Pipex on our website and changing each one to ‘GX Networks’. We’re also getting some nice new signs made for outside the office.
If you’re one of our customers, you’ve probably seen the Pipex name on emails we’ve sent you - invoices, renewal reminders, that sort of thing. From now on, the GX Networks name will replace Pipex on these communications.
You’ll also see that the footer of our website contains the new name, and any charges to your debit or credit card may appear on your statements as being paid to GX Networks.
But apart from that, nothing else is changing: 123-reg will continue to be called 123-reg. You can continue to find out about our products and services on our main site, and get help and support (as well as contacting us) from our support site.
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After months of anticipation, last night we finally played Rackspace at 5 a side football in the first ‘Web Hosting Challenge Cup’ aka the W.H.C Cup (I just made that name up).
The day did not start well with our new football kit delivered to our old Nottingham office’s address, with no hope of getting it down to London in time for the game. Although we had plenty of volunteers to take the day off to drive up and down the M1, a decision was made to leave it.
With both teams having just finished first (Rackspace) and second (us) in their respective leagues (us in the Monday league and Rackspace in the Tuesday league), the quality of football was only ever going to be of the highest standard.
Buoyed by the largest crowd we had seen at one of our games, with upwards of 7 supporters cheering us on, our spirits were high. The game started as it was destined to go on, with a foul, some bad language and some back chat. Both teams had patches of dominating possession, although Rackspace’s higher fitness levels helped them to maintain their passing and moving for greater lengths of time. Some excellent defending and a couple of dubious refereeing decisions in our favour kept us with in touching distance, until Rackspace snatched victory with a late goal, making it 6-5.
So its congratulations to Rackspace for a game well played, and we are looking forward to the Spring for a re-match!!
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Another day, another well known name involved in a domain name dispute. This time it’s The Economist, which has failed to wrestle control of theeconomist.com from a chap called Jason Rose.
He bought the domain in 1996 - it currently hosts a simple picture of well-known economist Alan Greenspan. As usual, the whole affair is reported on The Register.
The case was brought by The Economist to the World Intellectual Property Organisation’s dispute resolution service. Rose’s defence was to claim that, at the time of registering the domain, he’d never heard of The Economist.
Perhaps understandably, The Economist disputed this (hasn’t everyone seen their legendary poster campaigns?). But the decision went against the publication. As the WIPO’s panel said of Rose’s assertion:
“Despite the panel’s misgivings about the credibility of his claim, this proceeding under the policy is not the proper forum for testing its validity more than 11 years after the domain name was registered.”
So - for now at least - the domain stays in Rose’s hands. If The Economist fancies its luck again, it can try litigation instead.
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We don’t usually like to show off too much, but some research landed in our inbox the other day which says we’re officially the biggest web host in the UK. We think that’s worth shouting about.
Netcraft (which provides research data on all sorts of online stuff) just released their latest hosting provider switching analysis. 123-reg is part of a group of several brands: 123-reg, WebFusion, Donhost and Supanames. Together, we’re the biggest web host in the UK. By a mile. We reckon that’s quite an achievement.
The research shows that we host over 1.5 million websites. Our nearest UK competitor only hosts a bit over 600,000. That’s quite a gap.
We’ve knocked up a quick graph in Excel to show the difference between us and our nearest UK competitors. Click to see it full-size - the numbers up the side are the percentage of UK websites each of the companies along the bottom hosts.
You may be thinking, well that’s great for you, but what does that mean for me? Well, if you’re a customer, you benefit from this in loads of ways. Here are just a few:
- It means you can trust us with your domains and websites. We’re not some fly-by-night company operating out of a lockup somewhere. We’re here to stay.
- We’ve got a big, powerful infrastructure to support all those websites, with massive capacity - for instance, that’s why we’re able to offer unlimited bandwidth with every dedicated server.
- Economies of scale mean we can buy things in bulk at a discount, and that discount gets passed onto you in the form of our low prices.
- We can innovate and attract partners to produce exciting new products, like Google Analytics Automation and the WebWorx24 custom web design service.
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A common criticism by students of ASP.NET hosting in the UK is the cost.
That’s why our sister company, WebFusion, in partnership with Microsoft, is now offering free ASP.NET hosting to all UK students!
The free hosting includes:
- Windows Server 2008, IIS 7
- 500 MB disk space
- SQL Server 2005 database
- Support for ASP.NET 2.0, .NET 3.0, classic ASP and PHP
To get your free account you need a unique code and an email address ending in .ac.uk. The codes will be distributed directly via Microsoft’s faculty contacts, at the upcoming Inspiration Tour venues or from Ed Dunhill’s blog here.
Each session of the Inspiration Tour will cover the fundamentals of .NET, showing the latest and greatest developer technologies and highlight what opportunities are available for students. Get more information here.
If you already have a code, what are you waiting for? You can activate it over on the WebFusion website.
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Webfusion, our sister company, sponsored the ‘Website of the year - people’s choice’ award in the .net magazine awards 2007. The awards are now closed and winners have been selected:
The people’s choice award short list was:
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Web Jam
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Fantastic Photos
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Work Connexions
and the winner is Web Jam - congratulations!
For all other winners of the 2007 awards visit www.thenetawards.com.
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