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:

• Web Jam

• Fantastic Photos

• 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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While many of us at 123-reg are heading off for Christmas, the office won’t be completely deserted. Our dedicated support team will be sticking around to provide help online and on the phone.

You’ll be able to contact them as usual: from 9am - 7pm, Monday - Friday, over the whole of the Christmas and New Year period.

So we can deal with your query in the best way, there are several ways to find help and get in touch. To see which is best for you, please have a read of our contact us page.

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As a special Christmas treat, we’ve decided to give 123-reg customers who read this blog a sneak preview of our exciting new webmail system.

It’s fully functional, so you can use it to send and receive email and any settings that you configure should remain when we do the full launch in the new year.

Please check it out at http://webmail.123-reg.co.uk. You need to log in with your 123-reg popbox username and password.

Let us know what you think of the new features by leaving a comment here, or dropping us a line at listentomenow@123-reg.co.uk.

Merry Christmas!

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Hot on the heels of the November report from Nominet, VeriSign - the global registry operator for .com and .net domains - has released its quarterly report into the state of the domain name industry.

Ever wondered how many domains there are? Examining the third quarter of 2007, the report reveals there’s now a total of 146 million registered domain names worldwide. That’s an increase of 6 per cent over the second quarter of this year.

As also mentioned in the Nominet report, .cn (China) is now the fourth largest TLD (top level domain), having just leapfrogged .uk. Year-on-year, it works out as a 467 per cent increase in .cn registrations. No, you didn’t misread that. I really did say 467 per cent.

The huge growth might have something to do with a promotion which the .cn registry has been running. It means it currently costs the equivalent of about 6 pence to register a .cn domain for a year. The offer finishes at the end of 2007, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens in 2008.

An area which hasn’t grown enormously is domain renewals. By and large, people are hanging onto their domains; almost three-quarters get renewed before they expire. That figure hasn’t dipped below 70 per cent for a few years now, and is reflected in the fact that 87 per cent of domains point at an active website.

Still, the flipside is that around 25 per cent of all domains don’t get renewed. Many of these will become available on the open market again (you can search for domains on 123-reg). So as we’ve discussed before, there’s still plenty of choice out there if you’re in the hunt for a catchy domain name.

If you have a few minutes to spare, it’s worth digging a bit deeper: read the full VeriSign report here (300KB PDF).

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Towards the end of November, Nominet - the organisation which runs the .uk domain registry - released its domain name industry report. This is the first one they’ve produced - the stated aim is “to share information and insight about trends and developments within our industry”.

It paints a fairly interesting picture of the state of the UK domain name industry, including information about how many domain names get registered, renewed and cancelled.

You can view the full report here - it’s a 28 page PDF weighing in at around 4MB.

It’s definitely worth a look, even if you only have a causal interest in the subject. Here are a few facts from it that jumped out at me. All these were correct at the time of the report’s publication:

• 48% of all domain names end in .com
• There are around 140,000 .uk domains registered each month
• There are 23 domain names for every 1,000 people on the planet
• China’s become one of the largest domain name markets - there are now more .cn domains than .uk ones, and they’re still being registered at the rate of about 1 million per quarter.
• The most common starting character for a .uk domain is ’s’ followed by ‘c’, and over a million domains contain a hyphen.

As well as checking out the full report, you can read about its background over on the Nominet management blog. They’re after feedback too, so if there’s something you’d like to see covered in the future then let them know.

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Do you use 123-reg products to run a successful, interesting or slightly unusual website?

Maybe you use our shared or dedicated hosting to run your business’s website. Perhaps you sell online using our ecommerce package, or you leapt up the search rankings with help from InstantTraffic.

Whatever it is, I’d like to hear from you. I’m planning a series of features on this blog profiling some customers who do interesting things with our products.

The pieces will be promoted in our newsletter and might get used elsewhere too, so it’s a great chance to get some exposure and links for you and your business.

To let me know your story, drop me a line. Just leave a comment here, or send an email to hosting-marketing@pipex.net.

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