Recently in Domains & DNS Category

Remember 365 selling to UK company Names.co.uk?
Well seemingly Names.co.uk like to overcharge their clients ...

I already mentioned their pricing policy on co.uk transfers out, but they've since gone on to expand that to include com/net/org/info/biz domains. Don't believe me?

Check out this screenshot from the Register365 / Namesco control panel (click to enlarge):


Or how about this invoice a client paid recently for the "right" to move his domain elsewhere (click to enlarge):


So in simple terms if you are NOT happy with their service and want to change provider you will get billed for changing YOUR domains to a new provider.

Aren't they great?

Companies behaving in this manner give a bad name to the entire industry and really make me sick. While I may have had my differences with the previous owners of register365 I somehow doubt that they'd have stooped this low!

And to make matters all the more interesting ..

I'm getting reports from some clients that the charges are being imposed, while others are being told that they can leave without having to pay - what about the people who don't question charges?

NB: Yes I have a vested interest in the hosting and domain industry and I don't hide it. On the other hand I would never be interested in running a company that abused registrants in this manner - there are plenty of ways to make money, messing your clients about isn't one of them

Either the IEDR believes its own PR or the PR company it uses are clueless.
I'm not sure which one it is.

In any case they've pushed out yet another one of those "look at how wonderful we are" type press releases. You know the type. A few facts padded by loads of waffle with pretty much no substance.

Read about it over on my domain blog.

And while talking about the IEDR Tom was good enough to share his insights into the IEDR's crazy claims

I also decided to put the domain iedrsuck.eu live - nothing very exciting for the moment, but I'm sure I can find new things to do with it

I'm really tired of the shenanigans involving the IEDR and the IE namespace, so I wrote this rant.

Feedback welcome (on that site :) )

When you own "odd" domains you become accustomed to getting rather odd emails. Some of the emails are genuine. Some are simply weird.

Armchair.ie has nothing to do with furniture. You don't need to be a genius to realise what the site is all about, yet every single day for the last two weeks I have got an email from a company in China offering me furniture. It's not random furniture either. Each email has included a photo of the piece of furniture in question and they've all been some form of armchair.

Of course with some of the other domains that I own the emails are even more bizarre.

People seem to have issues typing email addresses, so I get emails destined for variants of the domains that I hold. (I usually let them know they've made a mistake)

The oddest one to date has been about an outstanding invoice for condoms! Since they wouldn't accept that I had nothing to do with the domain's former owner I ended up disabling all email for that domain.

One of the hot topics that will be under discussion at the upcoming ICANN meeeting in Paris will be the introduction of new TLDs.

I've mentioned a few of the campaigns previously on my domain blog (expect more activity on there while I'm at ICANN!)

So how many new TLDs will there be?
How many applicants can we expect to see?

I had been thinking about the entire thing a small bit over the last year, but Anthony Van Couvering decided to go one step further and conducted an informal poll

He emailed a group of people from within the domain industry, including myself, and asked us what we thought. The numbers and comments are quite diverse, but based on the conversations I've been privy to, they're hardly surprising.

Over the past couple of years this site has been IPv6 enabled from time to time, but it ended up losing its IPv6 some time ago.

It's now back and working again!

Thanks to Niall, who did some rejigging of DNS and network stuff yesterday to get it all working properly again!

The more content that is available over IPv6 the better.

Anyone who has a dedicated or colo server with us can get native IPv6 if they want. Simply ask!

I always applaud inventive and innovative marketing techniques. I think they're great.

But when the marketing department of a multinational starts inventing domain names you have to wonder what they're at!

Chris from Sensorpro spotted a Dell advert publicising dell.co.ie I suspect someone got Ireland and the UK confused, as we don't have a co.ie extension!

In fact, if you try to get either you will see:

And here's the banner image (click to enlarge) :

Hosting365 have announced that they've sold Register365, which is their shared hosting and domains business to Namesco a UK provider.

So now Ireland's largest provider is no longer Irish. According to the press release Hosting365 are going to focus on their managed services.

What does that mean for the Irish hosting market?

It could be interesting times ahead, as Novara was already swallowed up by Irish Telco Digiweb earlier this year.

Are there more acquistions and sales in the pipeline?

I have little or no patience for spammers, as most people know.

Since I run several sites that deal with domains and the internet industry in general I seem to have been targetted by TodayNic's comment and forum spammers. Over the past year or so I've had to remove multiple spam comment attacks from several sites.

It's annoying. Very annoying.

However it's even more annoying when they have the gall to demand that I remove a post I made last year about their spam.

Considering they're still spamming from what I've seen in the last few weeks I can think of no good reason to remove any posts where I've referred to Todaynic's spam.

Someone claiming to be "Chris" from Todaynic left  a comment on another one of my blogs at around 3am this morning.