I’ve mentioned webhosting.info’s hosting stats several times over the past couple of years. While I still do not find them to be 100% accurate I would consider them to be a relatively good barometer of relative sizes etc.,
During the course of 2006 Blacknight’s growth was steady and healthy (screenshot from domaintools)
If you look at our overall position compared to our competitors in the Irish market, however, the picture is much more revealing:
Paul spotted our new position at number 2 last week.
As he mentioned we’ve just taken on a new sales manager, so hopefully if he does his job we’ll continue to grow and I’ll get my dream car one of these days 🙂
I first registered blacknight-solutions.com back in July 2000. I didn’t even pay for the first year’s domain registration, as I won it in a competition (the hyphenated domain was a really bad idea by the way).
Personally I’d never have imagined that six and a half years later we’d be in the top three!
So what for the future?
We’ve got lots of interesting plans in the pipeline and they’ll be revealed at the right time (I hope!) on the company blog or main site.
You might be asking yourself why I’m not blogging about this on the “official” Blacknight blog… Well the answer is very simple – a lot of it started here.
Just over 3 years ago I started this blog (November 2003). At the time I was playing about with Movable Type and used the blog as a way of venting my random thoughts and frustrations:
Working for your own company is an odd experience. At times you lack inspiration and would like to throw in the towel. At other times you find yourself driving yourself forward in way no employer could ever imagine
November ’03
A lot has changed since then….
First we hired Niall, who has since moved onto Google.
Then we moved into our offices….
Then there was the staff expansion.. and more expansion and, well, more expansion…
We’re now running out of space in the office again!
NB: Figures only reflect Com/net/org/info/biz They do not take into consideration ccTLDs, such as .ie, co.uk or regional / specialist extensions such as .eu , .travel
Well deserved Michele.
Thanks Adam 🙂
Well done michele et al now if you want to beco me number one, then consider what h365 has they blacknight doesn’t, IMHO their hsphere control panel is wonderful
Ambrand
Em thanks (I think 🙂 )
Michele
to the experienced customer a control panel can make or break a hosting company, it is very much like the menu on a mobile phone consider the terriuble erricson menus of the past, and yet when promoting services people focus on uptime
Can’t stand h-sphere myself, I think it’s a complete pain in the arse to use. But then I’m a masochistic Plesk man meself.
Hi Michele,
Just wanted to say congrats on being number 2 for hosting in Ireland. I have taken out three hosting packages with Blacknight in the last couple of months, and I have to say that I am very impressed so far.
What initially attracted me was the price and services available, but I have to say that it was the support that led me to take out the other two.
While I may not be in the same league as the company in one your most recent posts, I will be using Blacknight again the future.
Once again, congratulations, and best of luck for the future.
Regards,
Paul
Ambrand – I’ve looked at H-sphere more than once and I really don’t like it. I find DirectAdmin is much cleaner.
From a sysadmin point of view retaining some level of control is also important, which is why we have always been very wary of control panels that takeover too much
Paul – thanks for the positive feedback. It’s nice to hear something positive 🙂
Michele
I generally dislike services that dictate only one way to run them. Apps like h-sphere make it hard to do things like adding a dedicated SMTP cluster or even worse, a dedicated IMAP setup (with e.g. something like Cyrus Murder for load balancing and a cluster filesystem for the mail stores). The fun really starts when you start hacking the control panel to work with your setup and then start maintaining those hacks to each new version over time. It’s like fun, but a bit different.
The ideal control panel would allow for and respect a custom setup as well as a vendor recommended one. Perhaps one day I might get around to writing one 🙂
p.s. Thanks for the mention 🙂
Niall
As employee number 1 you’ll always deserve a mention 🙂
Michele