Looks like EURid have been listening.

According to Netcraft, EURid has suspended 74,000 .eu domain names and sued 400 registrars for breach of contract. (Here’s the official announcement.)

Frankly, I hope the perpetrators (should they prove to be guilty) get stung, heavily. I have a strong dislike for criminal behaviour of any sort, and this kind of mass exploitation is ridiculous and needs to be punished.

On a more practical note, if anyone failed to register a .eu domain name in the initial rush, I’d check whether those domains are part of the 74,000 suspended names. The process might take a while but there’s a reasonable chance that a good portion of those 74,000 are going to become available at some stage and you’ll probably never get an opportunity like this again.

The latest edition of N3Lite, the domain name ‘newsletter’ from NetNames, is out.

A lot of it is very factual, intended for internet professionals (and therefore ends up being a bit ‘dry’) but its extremely informative for anyone who has an interest in the inner workings and machinations of the planet’s various domain name registrars and controllers.

For instance, following my previous post about the apparent dodginess of many .eu domain name registrations, N3Lite reveals EURid (the .eu registry) is going to investigate 40,000 domains as, if the registrant isn’t based in Europe as has been claimed, the registrations will be invalid.

N3Lite is available as a web site and an emailed newsletter and there’s an archive if you want to read some old issues.

Frankly I’m a little disappointed that it isn’t available as an RSS feed since so much of my information comes through feeds these days. Perhaps I’ll drop them an email and suggest it

The Netcraft July 2006 Web Server Survey has been released.

If you’ve not come across Netcraft before, check them out. Apart from being based fairly local to me they do some amazing work in watching the web hosting industry.

The Web Server Survey watches changes in the web server technology used in as much of the web as they can handle (to all intents and purposes, all of it). It may look like geek-talk (OK, so it is ) but I find it fascinating to watch for trends and movements between different platforms.

I consider it essential reading.

One of the best things about hosting web sites at MyHost is that you get to use PLESK – its a great product that gives you total control over your web hosting account.

I thought I’d share with you two of my favourite features.

• Domain aliases: these very clever little things allow you to set up two (or more) domain names that resolve to the same web site. Why would you want to do this? Well, it could be that you own two domain names (e.g. www.example.com and www.example.net) and want to use them both. It could be that you have a specific domain name and a more generic one (e.g. www.companyname.com and www.computers.com) and want them both to work to attract the search engines. It could even be (and this is where I found myself recently) that you want to transition a site from one domain name to another – set up an alias and not only does your web site immediately work at the new domain, but (optionally) so does your email!
• Protected folders: very quickly you can protect any folder in your web site (or the whole site) with a username/password combo. Sure, this can also be achieved either using server side scripting or through the .htaccess file, and its no replacement for proper user authentication, but its so quick and easy that it has its uses. The main use I put it to is when I’m doing some design work that I want to hide from the public. It means you can put a site live and let the client see the site exactly as it will appear when finished, but keep it away from prying eyes.

There’s clearly far, far, far more to PLESK than these two tiny examples, and I’ll doubtless cover more of it in future posts, but sometimes its the small details that make all the difference and in this regard I have yet to be disappointed.

I am happy to announce that we have introduced a new payments provider Realex Payments. We can now process credit cards in realtime (over the phone for example) with the confidence that we are dealing with an Irish company and Irish Banks (thats a good thing , right ? ) I must admit that the whole process was very impressive and encouraging . The Realex people are a really nice and helpful bunch and it made a change dealing with a company that actually wanted your business, (a bit like ourselves)

The reason for this move was mainly down to feedback from our clients . We had only been offering PayPal (Dont get me started) and 2CO up until now which although did ‘WORK’ and was fine for the majority of our customers, going forward it was not doing our business any favours.

So here’s to taking lots of credit card orders in the future