Digiweb is a company on the move, the move upwards. It recently acquired the 088 phone prefix and plans offering a mobile phone service, it also recently started hosting boards.ie (my second favourite website), and today I learned that it is offering Free Hosting (1 year, 2GB storage, 15GB xfer month) and a Free Domain (1 year, new domain in the gTLDs of com/net/org/info/biz and it seems theccTLD of ie also).
Sounds good but what are the catches?
- It’s for Third-level students only (however in practice the only proof they ask for is an email address at that colleges domain, and my alma mater of UCC, at least, allows graduates to keep their college email address indefinitely, someone didn’t do their homework, but Digiweb are not the only Irish company to rely on the existance of an email address as proof of a current affiliation, Software4Students which is a reseller of Microsoft Student versions does the same).
- Not for commercial use. (so that novel PHP website you starting thinking about when you say the headline might put together cannot have Adsense on the periphery)
- After the year ends who will own the domain? (if its a .ie you can use the quill and pen/fax method to take it over from the IEDR directly, but if its a gTLD you will have to dance to Digiweb’s tune, and to continue the metaphor I don’t know what their CD collection looks like, but it will likely be easy-listening as they do use hsphere)
Actually, after a year, we’re happy for people to keep their domains (and pay for them in the usual way) or transfer them away if they want. We’re not going to play hardball that way!
Ideally, we’d prefer it if they stayed with us, and the onus is on us to make sure that we do a good enough job that they’ll want to stay
>We’re not going to play hardball that way!
I’m sure that is your idea, but I’ve seen it some many times, beware of being involved in a larger and larger organisation, and following the path of every small to large organisation I’ve dealth with certain things will start happening, first the support dept turns into a blackhole if a ticket is not answerable from and FAQ is is ignored, second then the accounts dept starts charging credit cards with random amounts at random times, third another company doing exactly what you do appears and people move to it, finally a legal dept or a commission driven outsourced ambulance chaser firm of solicitors starts to hound the people who paid by bank draft/EFT for the false outstanding amounts, of course this is the worse case scanario and hopefully it can be avoided