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.
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.
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!
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).
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:
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.
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.
As a result of the weekend’s problems, we received lots of feedback about how you’d like to be able to manage your nameserver settings.
Our dev team has been working to make sure the problems can’t happen again, and as part of the changes we’ve introduced the option of using a mixture of 123-reg and third party nameservers. You told us this would give you more flexibility and more control.
To change your nameserver settings, log into your control panel and choose the Modify domain option.
Please note that although our control panel will let you specify up to four nameservers, some registries do not support more than two.
Web statistics can be strangely compelling. Honestly, they can. Not convinced? What if you could:
You can get information about what real visitors are doing on your site. You can tell if a page is performing or not, and see exactly what difference a change makes. In short: you can stop guessing, and start making decisions based on facts.
For basic web statistics, you can download your site’s log files. Most web hosting packages (including all of ours) give you access to these. They record all page accesses - the files look very unfriendly, but they contain basic information like which pages were viewed and when. You can use free software like analog to turn what’s in your log files into an easy-to-read format.
If you want more advanced statistics, accessible in an easier, more immediate way, then Google Analytics could be just what you need. It can show you all the information I listed above, and loads more. To see exactly what it can do, take a look at the tour over on Google’s website.
Even though it’s free, Google Analytics compares well with packages costing thousands of pounds. The catch? You have to add tracking code to every page on your website. If the thought of dealing with raw code makes you break out into a cold sweat, this is a daunting prospect. And even if it doesn’t, adding the code to each page can be a laborious process.
That’s why we recently launched a new service called Tagging for Google Analytics. It automates the whole process of putting Google Analytics on your site. When you use it, it adds the tracking code to every page. Automatically. A couple of clicks and you’re done.
The service costs from just £1.49 a month. That gives you easy access to all your stats through a single 123-reg login - and ensures that all your existing and future web pages get tagged up correctly, so you know the statistics about your site are 100% accurate.
Find out more about Tagging for Google Analytics now.
The shortlists for the PC Pro Reliability & Service Awards 2007 have been announced, and we’re really pleased to hear that 123-reg has been nominated in the web host category.
So pleased, in fact, that a few people came into the office in fancy dress today to celebrate. Or was that because of Halloween?
Anyway, according to PC Pro, these awards are “the most comprehensive guide to customer support and product reliability in Europe, let alone the UK”. The winners are decided by readers of the magazine, who’ve been giving their opinions over the last couple of months.
Voting closed a couple of weeks back, so it’s no good us asking you to vote for us now. We’re just hoping you did if you had the chance. Who knows - if we win, maybe we’ll do the fancy dress thing again. With photos this time.
Our sister site WebFusion has been nominated in the ‘Online Service of the year’ category of the Windows Vista Magazine Wishlist Awards 2007.
If you also use WebFusion for your shared hosting, VPS, Dedicated server or Email, to vote for WebFusion and be in with a chance of winning some great prizes go to www.wishlist07.com and choose the ‘online service of the year’ category. Remember a vote for WebFusion is a vote for…WebFusion
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