Spiral Hosting

Our .IN domain promotion has been extended until 31 March 2010. Dot-IN is the official domain extension for India but registration is open to anyone, anywhere.

Why choose .in?

• International brand protection for businesses is more important than ever, and India represents the second largest nation on Earth.
• Protect your brand and open your business to a market of 1.2 billion people by registering a dot-IN domain.
• Don’t forget, there are more English-speaking people in India than the USA!

To take advantage of this price reduction, simply check for your domain’s availability. Subject to our usual T&C’s. Offer ends 31st March 2010.

There were big changes to the European Union ‘tax regime’ on 1st January 2010. As such, services we sell for “Business Use” are exempt from Value Added Tax (VAT) in 26 EU countries. We are advising all EU businesses to ensure that they are not unnecessarily paying 17.5% VAT.

Tax exemption exists for business customers in the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France (incl. Monaco), Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxemburg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden.

UK businesses: There is no tax exemption for UK businesses because Spiral Hosting is registered for tax in Northern Ireland. We cannot VAT-exempt invoices for UK businesses and you will have to reclaim any VAT from HMRC.
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Spiral Hosting have today relaunched our free domains promotion. Buy any new yearly web hosting package and enjoy free domain registration for life!*

It’s really simple. Spiral Hosting will give one free domain name for every web hosting package you purchase, and we will renew it for free for the life of your web hosting package.

Our checkout system will automatically mark your domain name as free when you purchase it along with your web hosting.

If you already have a domain name elsewhere, you can choose to transfer it to us and it can be your free domain name.

Your free domain name is completely yours. You own it, control the whois information, the nameservers and everything else. We simply register it for you, for free, for life!

Here are the steps to follow:

1) Choose any web hosting package

Sizes XS – XL on Shared Hosting packages

Host 10 – Host 200 on Reseller Hosting packages

2) Choose a domain name from up to 27 extensions (TLD’s)

General extensions: .com .net .org .info .mobi .name or .biz
Country extensions: .asia .at .be .cc .ch .de .dk .es .eu .fr .ie .in .it .me .nl .tv .uk .us or .ws

The full list of domain extensions available with each package can be found on our Promotions page.

3) We’ll register your domain name for free. It can be a brand new domain registration or you can choose to transfer a domain to us if you have one registered elsewhere.

4) Every time you pay for your web hosting renewal, we will renew your domain name!

Small Print: To be eligible for your free domain, please purchase it at the same time as your webhosting. Our order system will automatically mark eligible domains as free. If you have a domain registered elsewhere please contact our support team who can help you transfer the domain to us and it can be your free domain. Other legal stuff applies.

The IE Domain Registry has confirmed that there was a record number of dot-ie domains registered in 2009.

A total of 37,055 domains were registered during the year, which is an 8 percent increase on 2008 figures. There are now a total of 136,000 dot-ie domains registrations.

The fourth quarter of 2009 saw a total of 8,533 new registrations in October and December, representing a 11.5 percent rise on last year.

IEDR Chief Executive David Curtin said: “It is more encouraging still to report that overall, 2009 was our strongest year ever for .ie registrations; an 8 per cent increase on last year’s figure is significant against the backdrop of economic difficulty for businesses and consumers everywhere”.

“It is important that Irish entrepreneurs now recognise and seize opportunities for growth online.”

For more information on how and why you should register an .IE domain name please see: Spiral Hosting > Irish domain registration

Spiral Hosting strongly support open source products and believe they are central to the development of the Internet.

You may have heard that Oracle has acquired Sun and along with it, MySQL, which is the most popular open source database.

MySQL is not an important part of the acquisition. Oracle have bought Sun for other reasons. Their ownership of the MySQL project could have detrimental effects to the open source ideal. The concern is that if the Intellectual Property Rights for MySQL fall into the hands of MySQL’s primary competitor Oracle, then MySQL immediately ceases to be an alternative to Oracle’s own high-priced products.

With this in mind, we have signed the Help Save MySQL petition, and we are asking you to lend your support too by signing the petition. The Save MySQL website has lots of information about why the community feels that MySQL is important, and what you can do to ensure it stays open and freely available to the entire Internet community.

Spiral Hosting are announcing our first Snow Sale!

We are offering 10% off ALL domain names while it’s snowing here in Ireland.

That’s 10% off any domain extension you choose, and for any registration period available!

We know that many countries are used to heavy snowfall and arctic temperatures, but last night in Ireland it was -12 degrees (celcius) and some parts of the country are practically unreachable. Schools are closed and the Army might be drafted in to start shoveling snow. This could last another week or two, but the moment the snow stops, so will our promotion!

Take advantage of this promotion! Here’s how:

• Simply visit our site
• Choose any domain name!
• Choose 1 to 10 years registration (where applicable)
• Enter the promo code: snow

This offer expires: when it stops snowing in Ireland. Valid on new registrations and transfers only. Available to new and existing customers. Our usual Terms & Conditions apply.*

We regret to inform you that CNNIC has announced an indefinite suspension of all .CN registrations from overseas Registrars, including our registration provider OpenSRS/Neustar.

As a result of this action by CNNIC, we can no longer provide new .CN registrations with immediate effect.

Please note that renewals and transfers will continue to be supported. There is no timetable for the resumption of new registrations, but we’ll keep you posted if the situation changes.

The .Info Promotion has been extended for another 6 months. All new .Info registrations are only €1.95 until the end of June 2010.

The discounted price will be reflected at the checkout. No coupon code is required.

All about .Info

The .INFO generic top-level domain was introduced in 2001 and has since grown to be one of the most widely used TLDs on the Internet. .INFO domains, as the extension would suggest, tend to be used mainly for websites where the primary goal is to provide information.

• There were approximately 5.2 million .INFO domains registered as of April 2008.
• .INFO is the fourth largest gTLD on the internet, after .com, .net and .org.
• The word ‘info’ means “information” in 37 languages.
• .INFO is the fastest growing new TLD to date.

To take advantage of this promotion, simply check for your domain’s availability. Offer valid until 30th June 2010. Available to both new and existing customers. Promotion price for 1st year of new registrations or 1st year of multi-year registrations only. Subject to our usual T&C’s.

We launched an update to our website in the early hours of Saturday morning. It’s dubbed “version 3″ and the changes are quite significant.

The main things you will notice are:

• The website design has improved. It’s a lot neater, it isn’t as wide as before and it works in much better proportion with different screen resolutions.
• The country flags on the top right. Yes, we’ve started showing different content to different countries based on IP delivery and the user’s preference. The countries currently supported are Ireland, UK, US and France.
  This allows us to show local currency pricing, local phone numbers and other details relevant to each country on the website. For example, you can see how www.spiralhosting.ie/contact has our Irish phone number and www.spiralhosting.com/uk/contact has our UK phone number. Localized content only shows on some pages at the moment, but the infrastructure is now there for us to fully roll it out.
• We now have a multi language website. The first language we’ve added is French (www.spiralhosting.fr). A sizeable amount of our customers speak French, and we also hope more will join us!
• We now support multiple currencies. You can purchase in Euros, Pounds or Dollars depending upon your preference. Prices in Pounds and Dollars are updated daily on our website based on our base currency (Euros) so we always offer the best price.
• We have added new products such as GlobalSign SSL certificates and .fr domain names.
• We’ve also updated the templates on our Client Area, Company Blog and Status Blog to reflect the new design.

Version 3 is a big improvement but it’s only the first step. We have more updates planned shortly as we add more languages, currencies, products and features.

We want to say a big thank you to our web designer Clément for all the work he has put into it. Great job!

If any customers or visitors have feedback on the new site or find any bugs (like broken links) please do let us know.

Ho! Ho! Ho! We have sent the following email to all customers:

Merry Christmas from Spiral Hosting!

Dear client,

Thank you for your continued support over the past year. Spiral Hosting has grown, developing our infrastructure and customer support and building on our successful brand and products. We have big plans for the next year, and we hope that as our business prospers yours does too.

Instead of sending you a Christmas card this year, we have chosen instead to make a charitiable donation to Concern Worldwide.

Concern is committed to a world without poverty. They work in 28 countries bringing food, clean water, good health, education and a higher standard of living.

We donated by buying gifts from www.concerngifts.org. We bought some essential drugs, water filters, two piglets, six chickens and a donkey called Pete.

If you would like to know more about the work of Concern, visit www.concern.net or call their donation line (Ireland: 1850 410 510 or UK/International call +44 (0)800 032 4002).

Wishing you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy & Prosperous New Year,

The Spiral Hosting Team.

http://www.spiralhosting.com

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You can view all the latest announcements, including Christmas opening hours, on our company blog.