October 2006
You are currently browsing the articles from WhoisIreland Review written in the month of October 2006.
Digiweb is trying to get back in the hosting game. Its latest colour brochure boasts that it has the lowest prices for domains in Ireland. It also claims to have Ireland’s most modern shared hosting platform. I don’t think that the managment of Digiweb appreciates the gulf that has opened between it and the leaders in the Irish hosting business.
Initially a hosting company, Digiweb branched into the telco/ISP business a few years ago. It also became very successful as an ISP. But in the process it left its original core hosting business on the back burner. This allowed some of the current hosting service providers (HSPs) to get established and build up good client bases. How good? Well Digiweb is now ranked number 13 in the list of top Irish hosters with a BIONIC (Biz/Info/Org/Net/Ie/Com) domains hosted figure of 2443. By comparison, Hosting365.ie has a BIONIC of 20190 domains as of 01/October/2006.
The Digiweb business hosting plans are not exactly cutting edge. There are three: Business Starter; Business eCommerce and Business Enterprise. The prices are 9.99 Euros per month, 19.99 Euros per month and 29.99 Euros per month.
The Business Starter package is 9.99 Euros a month and provides hosting for 10 domains. It has 3G of storage space, 25GB of transfer per month, 250 e-mail accounts. Scripting and data base support is provided.
The Business eCommerce package is 19.99 Euros a month and provides hosting for 25 domains. It has 5G of storage space, 50GB of transfer per month and 500 e-mail accounts. It also has scripting and data base support. It has eCommerce support with an integrated shopping cart.
The Business Enterprise package allows for an unlimited number of hosted domains. It has 10G of space with 75GB of transfer per month and 1000 e-mail accounts. It also has eCommerce support with an integrated shopping cart.
Pricewise, the packages are similar to those of Hosting365.ie or Novara.ie or Blacknight Solutions. But there is a significant differerence. The Digiweb packages are aimed at businesses. The home/non-business section of the hosting market is important. Many of these accounts are those of bloggers and family websites. And perhaps more importantly, they are the sites of larval webmasters. These are the people who will be buying hosting in the future.
The landgrab strategy has been used before by a number of players to grow their market share. It typically involves selling near to cost or below it. Digiweb’s domain prices are close enough to cost that the profit is minimal. Buying market share has been done by WebhostingIreland.ie, Letshost.ie with the result that both are now significant players. But is it too late for Digiweb’s landgrab?
Tags: Irishblogs,IEDR, Domains, Webhosting, Internet Statistics, Irish Webhosters, domainnames
Written by John McCormac on October 17th, 2006 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics and Irish Tech News.
It seems that IEDR still wants .ie to be porn free. It has turned down the application for porn.ie on the grounds that it might be offensive. And yet it is quite prepared to allow an apparent cybersquatting operation register irishindependent.ie (one of the biggest daily newspapers in Ireland), bebo.ie, dmoz.ie, googel.ie (google typosquat), windowsonecare.ie, onecare.ie with registered business name certificates or variations of the words on these certificates.
The story has made it to slashdot.org and to TCAL . The chances of getting this domain are not good. But then IEDR has to be seen to managing something and its management can point to something like this as evidence that it indeed being proactive in protecting .ie ccTLD.
Despite the posts on slashdot.org about freedom of speech and such, the .ie ccTLD is a regulated TLD. IEDR has to conform to the legislation governing .ie and this legislation is more restrictive than that for .com or any other gTLD. This means that terms that could be registered in gTLDs cannot be registered in .ie ccTLD.
Tags: Irishblogs,IEDR, Domains, Cyberwarehousing, domainnames
Written by John McCormac on October 16th, 2006 with 3 comments.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics.
These are the top 10 .eu hosters as of 01/October/2006. The figures are based on approximately 81.57% of .eu domains mapped. The data is from a spreadsheet based report on the .eu ccTLD that will be published shortly by WhoisIreland.com (Details available from salesdept@whoisireland.com).The term BIONIC refers to the gTLDs and the .ie ccTLD (Biz/Info/Org/Net/Ie/Com).
What is unusual is that no UK hoster features in the top ten hosters. The number of parking and monetisation hosters (Sedo, Ovido Limited, Fabulous.com, Xss.ro, Blizem.nl) in the top hosters is unhealthy for any ccTLD.
Hoster — BIONIC — .eu — Country
- 1UND1.DE 345874 — 109834 — DE
- UDAGDNS.NET 244866 — 105153 — DE
- RZONE.DE 158584 — 78161 — DE
- OVIDIOLIMITED.COM 0 — 62836 — CY
- SEDOPARKING.COM 832876 — 55193 — US
- XSS.RO 27 — 43371 — RO
- FABULOUS.COM 811759 — 42108 — AU
- TECHNORAIL.COM 226748 — 39706 — IT
- BLIXEM.NL 34 — 38276 — NL
- SECURESERVER.NET 8321657 — 28265 — US
The Ovidio / Fausto /Gabino Limited counts have massively increased the number of Cyprus (CY) registered domains. This is the Ovidio syndicate direct navigation network. The XSS.RO count is due to a cyberwarehousing operation. It had previously had its domain on the nameservers of a few European registrars but moved these domains to Romanian IP space in late Summer.
The prominence of German hosters is to be expected as Germany has the most .eu domains registered. Though many of these domains, like the bulk of .eu seem to be pointed at parking pages. Like many things, the .eu dream may be coming soon. But for many Irish, UK and European companies and rights holders who have seen their domains squatted thanks to PwC BE’s pathetically robotic attitude to the Sunrise rules and even its granting domains to dubious Benelux ampersand trademarks, it is already a nightmare.
Tags: Irishblogs,.eu Statistics, Domains, Webhoster Stats, Internet Statistics, Eurid, Cyberwarehousing, domainnames
Written by John McCormac on October 13th, 2006 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics.
Should IEDR be worried about the impact of .eu on the Irish market? This does imply that the board of IEDR has a clue about the domain business. It does not. Not one of the members of the board has operational experience in the domain business. So it is left to the management of IEDR to be concerned. But does it really understand what is going on in the .eu ccTLD?
There is a huge discrepancy between the number of .eu domains detected on Irish hosters (around 5700) and the number of Irish registered .eu domains (28K+) claimed by EUrid. The reality lies somewhere in between. While the distribution of .eu domains for Ireland shares similarities with the hosting situation of a few years ago. Back then, the hosting business here was dominated by ISPs and most small hosters hosted outside of Ireland on hosters in the UK and US. Given that there were only a few accredited .eu registrars in Ireland (EUInternet.com, Irishdomains.net, Eircom.net, Esat.net) there wasn’t much to choose from. So there is a good chance that Irish registrants used .eu registrars outside of Ireland.
But even with that taken into consideration, the numbers for Irish owned .eu domains is unusually high. Some of that can be attributed to front companies for cyberwarehousing operations like Marchex/Ultsearch registering .eu domains through an Irish front company. More can be attributed to the incompetence of EURid when it comes to dealing with bogus registrant data. There are probably tens of thousands of .eu domains with bogus registrant addresses. And of course there was the landrush madness that would have led to people trying to get domains - many of which will lapse next year when it turns out that there is no resale market for them.
IEDR has introduced an API which should speed up things for resellers. (Thanks to poorly drafted legislation, there is no such thing as an IEDR registrar.) But the more management that IEDR gives up to the resellers, the more difficult it becomes to justify the costs of IEDR.
IEDR has allowed cyberwarehousing operations within .ie ccTLD. Its management was completely lacking when it allowed EUBROWSER.COM to register domains like bebo.ie, irishindependent.ie, googel.ie, dmoz.ie, windows-onecare.ie, onecare.ie and a few hundred others, many of them generic terms.
But the figures for .eu do not pose a threat to .ie ccTLD yet. Indeed the figures for .eu relative to any European ccTLD do not pose any immediate threat. What IEDR has failed to do is to take advantage of the incompetence of EURid. As soon as it became apparent that Irish companies where not getting their .eu due to PwC BE’s “interpretation” of the Sunrise rules, IEDR should have used some of their tame press release recyclers in the Irish tech media to hammer home the point that Irish companies stand a far better chance of getting their domain .ie ccTLD. And the slogan? “Screw .eu - It’s .ie for me!”
Tags: Irishblogs,IEDR, Domains, .eu Fiasco, Internet Statistics, Eurid, Cyberwarehousing, domainnames
Written by John McCormac on October 12th, 2006 with 1 comment.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics.
The top ten Irish web hosters as of 01/October/2006 contains some surprises. Esat (BTIreland) has fallen out of the top five as its decline continues. Eircom.net is still at the number two position but it is being chased by Novara.ie and may well be overtaken this month. Considering that only three ISPs remain in the top ten Irish Hosters list, the Irish market has matured considerably. The second generation Hosting Service Providers (HSPs) have taken over the market.
The figures below are for com/net/org/biz/info/ie (BIONIC) domains hosted.
HOSTING365.IE 20190
EIRCOM.NET 8320
NOVARA.IE 7542
IRISHDOMAINS.NET 6908
BLACKNIGHTSOLUTIONS.COM 6471
ESAT.NET 5896
WEBHOSTINGIRELAND.IE 4436
HOSTIRELAND.COM 4286
U.TV 4100
LETSHOST.IE 3903
WhoisIreland.com publishes a 22 spreadsheet report on the Irish hosting business each month covering domain registration and movement statistics for Irish hosters over the com/net/org/biz/info/ie/eu/uk TLDs.
Written by John McCormac on October 10th, 2006 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics.
A post on Tom Raftery’s blog points to a very interesting development in the Blogosphere. Google has announced that bloggers can now ping it directly for inclusion in its blogsearch index. This move is interesting because it means that Google is taking blogging seriously. It also could spell trouble for Technorati and other blog search operations.
This blog seems to be having problems with Technorati. It fails to update information about it despite being pinged. And e-mails to its support desk go unanswered. Now that Google is in the game, the writing may be on the wall for blog aggregators and blog search sites. And having blogs integrated into Google provides a one stop shop for searchers - it has the audience that these other blog search sites do not.
Written by John McCormac on October 10th, 2006 with 2 comments.
Read more articles on Search Engines.
It turns out that the Belgian court order that forced EURid to reactivate over 74000 on-hold domain names was the result of the Ovidio syndicate registrars and registrants taking EURid to court. The court ordered EURid to reactivate the domains within 48 hours or face a fine of 25000 Euros per domain per hour for each hour it was in contempt of the order.
In July, EURId had cut the registrars’ connection to the registry system thus making it impossible for them to register domains and it put over 74000 domains on hold. This latest Belgian court action is the result of the registrars and registrants taking action against EURid to restore service and reactivate the domains.
The EURid action is scheduled for hearing next month.
Written by John McCormac on October 9th, 2006 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics.
EURid stated on its website that the it has unblocked the Ovidio syndicate’s domains due to a provisionary court order (as covered previously on WhoisIreland Review). The interesting aspect is that the unblocking of the domains may be just a standard temporary move and not a final decision. The court case is still proceeding. Naturally EURid cannot comment on an ongoing case in which it is involved. But the matter of the Ovidio syndicate’s domains has yet to be decided. The European domain business is paying attention to these proceedings as the outcome will decide the fate of .eu ccTLD.
Written by John McCormac on October 7th, 2006 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics.
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