To register a .eu domain name an individual, organisation, or company must:

1. Have its registered office, central administration or principal place of business within the EU.
2. Be an organisation established within the Community without prejudice to the application of national law.
3. Be a natural person resident within the EU.

You are also not tied in to use your new .biz domain name with UKCZ Hosting, but with prices starting at just £9.99 a year we hope you will also allow us to host your domain name too.

Of course we clicked the links provided in the ad, but none of them lead to any free hosting plans. Perhaps they too had made this offer as part of some short-lived promotion? Undaunted, we clicked around the poorly designed site and eventually found it via a link to domain registration. There it was, an offer of 30Mb disk storage with 500Mb of monthly bandwidth (misspelt as ‘bandwith’ on the site!).

Presumably the offer was a way of getting you to register a domain name with them, but with a .com listed as 7€ (which is £5.65 at today’s exchange rate - cheaper than our price of £6.99) we thought we’d give it a go. Sadly, or perhaps fortunately, the link to order this incredible offer didn’t work (surprise, surprise)!

Oh well, that’s £5.65 saved I guess, and a lesson learned. If an offer looks too good to be true, it probably is.

Only a couple of months ago, UKCZ Design could pick and choose the projects we accepted. We’re a small company with a good reputation for quality work delivered on time, and taking too much work would threaten that reputation. But not enough work could threaten the company, so it’s a fine balancing act which in the past we’ve not had any trouble achieving.

With the latest design project nearing completion, it was time once again to remind the English-speaking community in Prague about our services. So we placed an advert in the normal place, and waited for the phone to start ringing as it always had in the past. But we received only one enquiry.

Undaunted, we threw a page together offering a small business website designed for 5,000Kc , with free hosting for a year, and advertised that instead. We received a total of zero enquiries! Not one. Nobody in Prague wants a website designed and hosted for a year for less than £160 apparently.

Clearly the credit crunch and subsequent downturn is hitting even the normally better off Prague expat community. So when you hear politicians argue about whether we’re heading for a recession, remember this tale, and trust us when we tell you that we are.

Although there are millions of .com domain names registered already, that doesn’t mean that all the best names are gone. You’re not going to be able to register a four-letter or lower combination, but good domain names are still available if you forget about it being the shortest. Try to concentrate on it being either descriptive or memorable instead.

But that’s where the problem only begins. If you’re anything like me, you’ll wrack your brains trying to think laterally, only to end up with a list of ‘possibles’ which diminish in quality and value. Even so, instead of trying out a name at a time in the domain search, use our bulk domain name search tool, to see if any are still available to be registered.

Work smarter not harder!
Those who get ahead however use all the tools available and there’s none so much fun to use as our domain name suggestion tool. This will suggest possible domain names if you input a couple of descriptive words, like ‘record shop’.

There are some great suggestions for ‘record shop’ actually, and at the time of writing these were still available to be registered (just £6.99 a year with us!):

The best domains we found, in reverse order, are:

5. CountyRecordShop.com
4. RecordShopDirect.com
3. CyberRecordStore.com
2. NewRecordShop.com

But the winner for us had to be: BestRecordShop.com

You can’t really get better than that, and with hosting from £9.99 a year, UKCZ is the best place to register and host your domain.

These domains will be quickly snapped up now, no doubt, but keep an eye on our blog for more top tips in the future.

A few months ago I received a letter from a debt collection agency regarding the £9 I owed 1and1.co.uk for unpaid domain registrations. I wasn’t aware at the time that 1and1 automatically set domains to renew and thus I’d been billed for a number of domains that had been renewed.

…I’ve since tried to cancel the contract (after I received another email saying that I’d be charged again in 40 days for domains I haven’t used in 2 years) but I’m getting nowhere. I initated the cancellation process through the 1and1 contracts control panel and the system said that I’d receive an email with a confirmation link that would make the cancellation final. 4 days later - and I’m still waiting. I’ve since contacted the 1and1.co.uk and they’ve been largely unhelpful, recommending that I contact a different department.

It was a similar problem which lead 1and1 Internet fail to transfer all the .com domains our parent company owned, including ukcz.com. Grrrrr.

It’s just one of the many horror stories we experienced before setting up UKCZ domains and hosting.

Support for video, particularly YouTube video, is provided via plugins such as WP YouTube but it’s not really been that easy to produce a blog which centers around video. That’s all changed now that the Videographer Wordpress theme has been created and provided for free.

There is a demonstration of how it looks on this page, so if you want to video-blog and you like the look of the Videographer theme download it now.

His site was hosted via Verio and he was happy with their service except for one thing - the price. He was paying $49.95 a month because, having used them with a cheaper hosting plan before he decided to add MP3 files for download, he had discovered that he needed to upgrade to their most expensive shared hosting plan before MP3 files were permitted.

A quick investigation revealed that many shared hosts, especially at the cheaper end, don’t allow MP3 files to be hosted at all. All the same, £25 a month is a lot of money to pay out simply because you want to host MP3 files! His site isn’t that large either, so he was paying for webspace he would never use.

UKCZ Hosting offered him 500Mb of webspace, which was ample for his needs, for less than £25 a year. Most importantly for him, it comes with MP3 file support as standard. Needless to say he jumped at the chance to host his site for about a twelfth of the price he was currently paying!

He was so impressed with the hosting service, he commissioned UKCZ Design to create a Wordpress template to match his existing site, and to correct minor errors with his HTML to make his site standards compliant too. The design office was filled with his music for a few days whilst we worked on his site, which was a bonus.

Who is this lucky musician? His name is Jamie Marshall and his site remains happily hosted by UKCZ Hosting.

Considering what policies to apply to our domain registration services, somebody chipped in saying “just tell me we’re not going to do what Network Solutions do!”. Puzzled looks all round lead to the explanation that Network Solutions effectively hijack any .com you search for using their domain lookup. The accountant suggested that there might be a profit in this practice, but the rest of us were horrified.

Firefox was fired up on laptops around the room as we all headed off to Network Solutions to witness this practice. “Try NetworkSolutionsStoleThisDomain.com!” So that was what was typed into their search box and (surprise, surprise) the domain was available to buy for $9. We didn’t register it, instead we typed the URL into Firefox and saw that Network Solutions had indeed stolen this domain (see screenshot).

We had to break for coffee after this because all we could do was discuss how awful a policy this was. When we reconviened, we started a list entitled ‘Ethical domain registration policies’:

UKCZ shall:

• Provide unbiased domain registration results
• Provide domain registration at the lowest price we are able
• Provide clear information about registering a domain
• Not monitor domains searched for by customers
• Not ‘hijack’ any domain following a search
• Not ’steal’ domains which are not re-registered*

It’s probably not an exhaustive list, but at least we discussed the ethics of domain registration. We don’t think Network Solutions has, so chalk one up for us!

* This clause was added by the big boss. The accountant hates it because he says that he sees such holding pages all the time and they must make money for the hosting companies, but the boss explained that he lost two prize domains - including ukcz.com - to 1and1 Internet after they failed to transfer them when instructed to do so, placed their own spam pages up, and then sold the domains to companies who demand premium prices for them. Being forced to pay $1,000 or more for ukcz.com, especially when we had owned it for the five years previously is simply outrageous.