Hosting 365

It’s funny … when I joined hosting365 I had just setup Roundcube as my webmail client (I was a customer before I became an employee!) and it took about 30 mins (and I’m not a techie!), so naturally I thought it could be deployed within the same time for all customers.

Clearly I was wrong … there’s so much more to consider when innovating for a 30% of the Irish market than when playing with webmail for 1 person

However, after much work and testing (remember Roundcube is still beta) we’ve launched it for ALL OUR CUSTOMERS!

Just go to webmail.hosting365.com, and enter your email address and password - it’s that simple! No need to enter domains, no need to go through control panels.

In case you’re interested, the reason it couldn’t be launched in 30 minutes, is that we process 40 million emails a month, so you can image the impact of a IMAP based webmail client on our infrastructure!

Innovation is hard .. much harder in a big company .. but it’s worth it, and as you can see (ref: FREE BLOG PLAN !!!!) we’re really trying.

Expect to see more innovations over the coming months! In fact, why not use this blog for what’s it’s really mean’t - and post in the comments the kind of innovations YOU’D like to see from a hosting company. PLEASE!!!

In short, the EURid allowed bogus and phantom registrars to game the system; many registrars took payment for .eu names they were unable to secure and are now refusing to refund the payment (they probably shouldn’t have charged the person until the domain was successfully processed anyway!); the EURid system collapsed under the weight of requests (how was this not predicted and extra hosting infrastrucutre leased for the first month?); and TONS of intellectual property, business names and trademarks have been stolen.

What’s inexcusable is that .EU represents the largest economy in the world, and with all the TLD’s and ccTLD’s introduced in the past few years should have had ample information on how to correctly define the process and provision adequate hardware.

I still don’t believe that .EU will take off, despite a lot of commentary that .EU will rival .COM, and that most registrations are for brand protection rather than new business. As I said in a previous post - what market does .EU service? Not Europe anyway - with all the various languages to cater for, ccTLD’s are far more appropriate; and certainly not the intercontinental / global market - which is serviced effectively by .COM.

By way of example … when was the last time you visited a .US site? And what’s the difference in .US and .EU?

I see next month PC Live will be publishing a feature called ‘Ultimate Home Security Suites’. Unfortunately I think that it will be wholly focussed on DPIU software. That is, applications one Downloads, Purchases, Installs and Updates.

These applications are acceptable at best in a corporate environment, where updates can be pushed by the IT department, but the majority of home users don’t have the time or expertise to figure out which application to use for security. And although most applications provide an ‘auto update’ feature - many still require user confirmation or reboot permission, and because home users use their machines less frequently, they are at risk while all the updates are being downloaded.

The solution of course is SIMPLE! Okay … that’s not entirely true … but a huge portion of the solution can be made less reliant on the user. For example, hosted spam and virus filtering will prevant any viruses coming to your computer through email. Admittedly there’s still the Windows Update and Firewall issue, but by securing your email remotely, one of the major security gaps will have been plugged.

Why is online better? 2 reasons. Firstly, it’s on-line - as in, not on your computer - so viruses never actually reach your machine to have to be detected and removed (presuming your virus scanner catches them). Secondly the update process is no longer the end-users burden, as the on-line service will always have the most up-to-date spam list and virus definitions - making it more accurate.

For the past few months businesses could claim ownership of .EU domains if they had company registration or trademark documentation to support this claim - and 300,000 European Union wide did so.
On April 7th this pre-registration phase ends though, and anyone can register a .EU domain name.

Predictions are flying back and forth on how many domains will be registered, and how much of an impact .EU will have. To be sure in the first few months, many businesses will register a .EU to protect their trademark, and the hype will doubtless generate a few more sales, but in the medium-long term, what impact will the .EU TLD (top level domain) have?
First of all, where country domains such as .IE, .CO.UK, .NL and so on, do moderately well, that is primarily because they are VERY focussed on a specific nation. Whereas .EU is aimed at the entire European community - which is difficult to target on a single domain - because of the many languages involved.

I’m not sure where .EU fits in to be honest. As I said, a ccTLD (e.g. .co.uk) promotes the web site within a country - but where does .EU promote? .COM is arguably a better top-level or primary domain extension, as it’s generic and globally applicable. The .EU domain is really only useful for a company doing business ONLY in the EU and actually THROUGHOUT the EU (as oppose to within the business’s own country - in which case .be/.nl/.ie would suit better). And it’s more likely that a business would be international (EMEA / APAC) than just EU, as it’s actually easier do business with nations whose primary language is the same as the country of origin.
hosting365’s predictions on .EU registration numbers : the impact will be similar to that of .info and .biz : lots of hype, but the majority of registrations will be companies registering all TLD’s as a trademark protection exercise, and still using .com or the ccTLD as their primary domain.

We’re really pleased to annouce that we are launching (right now … this is the launch!) a ‘Free Blog Plan’ as part of our hosting services line-up!

The features are straightforward - the plan comes with Wordpress and K2 as default (K2 has a hosting365 logo and link to our site … but you are free to change the theme or customise the existing one as much as you like, and at no cost), 100mb of web space and the ability to use your own domain name.

So what’s the big deal? There’s already a number of companies offering free blogs - but to my knowledge we are the only one to offer totally free hosting, with no ads (our logo is there by default … but you can change this) AND at your own domain name. Using your own domain is probably the most important feature and key differentiator for the plan - as it’s a premium service for most other offerings.

You have to register your own domain name (plug: register365.com!) or change your DNS settings to our nameservers if you want to use an existing domain (all this information will come in a mail after you sign up)

Now … to pre-answer some of the questions. Why are we doing this? I’ve persuaded the CEO that providing this kind of service to the blogging community is a far better use of the marketing budget than print advertising etc. How can we do this? We’ve got this great data centre and infrastructure. Okay … if we suddenly get 10,000 signups we might have to hold new plans until we get more hardware to support it.

And I’ll pre-empt any questions about the signup process now - after you signup you will recieve an email with your account details (control panel access) and DNS settings. This using our existing hosting system and not a custom designed solution - so when you login to the control panel you need to install wordpress. It’s a one-click install that’s as simple as the normal Wordpress install so don’t panic!

The only real restrictions are that this is a blogging plan only. You can hack it to provide free web site hosting … but if you do that we’ll disable the account. Business Blogs and Personal Blogs are most welcomed!
So … without further ado … signup for a free blog !