Nominet, the UK domain authority, has made it easier for people to secure their domains by extending registrations to 10 years.

Until now, owners of co.uk, org.uk and me.uk could only register and renew their domains for 2 years. The change means you can own a domain for up to 10 years.

Another benefit of the change is that people can now register a UK domain for just 1 year, which is great news if the domain is needed for a short term project or a one-off event.

So, why register for a longer period?

• You’ll avoid any potential increases in renewal fees for the duration  of the domain’s registration.
• You don’t have to worry about renewing the domain every two years.
• It *may* have search engine optimisation benefits – some SEO studies show that search engines give your domain more weight if it’s registered for a longer time, the theory being that it shows you’re more committed.

Costs
£5 + VAT for 1 year registrations/renewals.
£4 + VAT for 2 years+ registrations/renewals.
For example, to register a domain for 3 years would cost £12 + VAT.

Can I renew a UK domain I already own for 1 – 10 years?
Yes, if you already have a UK domain you’ll be able to renew it from your billing area and choose the length of time you want to renew it for.

If you’d like to register a new UK domain, visit our domain ordering page.

To celebrate this milestone, Nominet, the company responsible for managing .UK are giving away a new iPAD a day for 30 days.

To enter all you need to do is purchase or renew your .UK domain name with Orchard between 28th March and 26th April and a winner will be chosen at random at 5pm that day.

Good Luck!

More details and terms and conditions at http://agreatplacetobe.co.uk/

We’d like to invite you to take part in our customer survey so we listen to your comments, make improvements and keep you happy.

The completely anonymous survey ends at the end of April and the link has been emailed to all clients.

We will be publishing the results on our site at the start of April.

VPS hosting is a platform which gives you all the features of a dedicated server but without the costs. This is achieved by sharing server resources with few other clients on the server.

Key features:

• Install any software to any configuration you like.
• Complete control – you have root access.
• Choice of operating systems.
• Choice of control panels.
• Reboot server and view statistics from your client area.

Our VPS packages are very affordable starting at £20 a month.

For more information, please visit: http://orchardhosting.com/virtual-hosting

If you have any questions or specific requirements for a VPS, you can contact Tom directly.

CloudLinux gives each user their own resource limits, which means if a user was to have a “load spike” in their resource usage, it wouldn’t affect anyone else on the server.

Benefits:

• Server stays stable where other operating systems would allow a server go down
• Single customer can’t abuse resources of the entire server
• Fail safe, a sudden spike in resources from one tenant will not effect other tenants

We’re rolling CloudLinux out to shared servers this week, in each case it will require a server reboot.
We will be emailing all clients a scheduled time for the upgrade.

Orchard Hosting
Unit 3, Fourth Floor
31 Dale Street
Manchester
M1 1EY

Our phone number will stay the same, and we’ll collect post sent to the old address for a month.

Well the mugs arrived from the suppliers today and we’re pretty pleased with them!

We have a limited supply, but if you’d like one, get in touch with me directly.

A DNS cluster is a number of name servers that share records, so if we create a site on a server, it’s records are copied to the four nameservers which has a number of benefits:

• if a server goes down, sites are back online quicker after it’s back because DNS was never down
• we can easily transfer hosting accounts around servers without the need to change nameservers with zero downtime
• one set of nameservers for all of our servers
• if their is a server outage, mail is not bounced immediately, mailservers will know to try again later. (within reason).
• if there was a catastrophic server failure, we can quickly route traffic to a different server

We’ll be pointing all our old nameservers at the cluster, so technically, existing clients don’t need to do anything to take advantage of this setup, however, we would recommend changing your nameservers to:

ns1.orchardhosting.com
94.76.207.114

ns2.orchardhosting.com
93.189.4.152

ns3.orchardhosting.com
63.223.120.195

ns4.orchardhosting.com
76.73.57.82

As having four new nameservers rather than the existing two is more reliable.
All new registrations will have the new nameservers set automatically.

It’s normally very easy to transfer a UK domain (co.uk, org.uk, ltd.uk etc), much easier than transferring a US domains in fact.

1. Ask your domain company to change the IPS tag of the domain to “ORCHARD”. Once this has been completed, we now have control but you still need to add the domain to your account.
2. To do this, place a new “transfer” order here and you domain will be added to your client area.

Top Level / US Domains

US domains such as .com, .net are trickier to transfer as there are a few more steps but this can’t be avoided. Unlike UK domains, when you transfer a US domain, you actually are renewing the domain for a year too and there is a cost of £9.99 + VAT to do this.

1. Check you have more than 30 days of registration time left on your domain’s life, else you will not be able to transfer your domain, only renew it with your current registrar.
2. Unlock your domain for transfer at your current registrar – they will give you an authorisation code.
3. Place a new transfer order making sure to enter the authorisation code correctly.
4. You’ll be ask pay £9.99 + VAT to initiate transfer.
5. In the next 4-48 hours the registered administrator of the domain will receive an email asking to confirm the transfer. If they don’t confirm, the transfer fails.
6. Have a cup of tea.
7. Within a week, but sometimes sooner, the domain will have transferred successfully.

Tools

If you are not sure which company or who registered your domain, you can do something called a WHOIS lookup which will give you this information.
You can use our domain checker to look up your domain and then click on WHOIS.

All you need to do to be in with a chance of winning is to register or renew a UK domain before the 28th November and then visit proudlyuk.org.uk to submit your entry.

Be proudly .uk and win tickets to Britain’s greatest events.

Show your pride in a .uk domain name. Join the 80% of UK users* who prefer a .uk domain.

And for a limited period of time, when you register or renew a .uk domain before 28th November 2011 you can be entered into a free prize draw to win tickets to some authentically British events.
Just by registering your .uk domain, you could be cheering on England or Ireland in the Six Nations match. Alternatively, you could enjoy world class tennis (together with the obligatory strawberries and cream) at Wimbledon. Or maybe you’ll spend a night in London’s West End with a theatre experience.

And it doesn’t end there. There are also daily Ticketmaster vouchers to be won together with an additional prize for the best tweet about being proudly .uk. It couldn’t be easier.

So you see; there’s never been a better time to be proudly .uk. It really is the best of British.

Visit proudlyuk.org.uk to learn more and take part.

*Domain name industry report 2010: “When users were asked if they would choose to visit a .uk site over a .com site when presented with a search result, 80% said that they would click on the .uk website.