VEVIDA has been one of the best hosting providers in Holland and Belgium for more than 10 years. We are proud of our company and proud to have you as a customer for our services. That’s why you’ll get extra benefits in the festive month of December! We’re deliberately not making this discount offer available to new customers - just to you as a loyal customer of VEVIDA. We have grown thanks to you and want to reward you for that with this offer. If, for example, you’ve been planning to register some other extensions for your domain name, this is the right moment.

VEVIDA 10×10 = € 100 December Offer

Only for loyal customers!

The discount offer for existing VEVIDA customers involves:

• from 5 to 31 December 2009
• 10 euro discount
• on a maximum 10 domains
• or 10 hosting packages

This means an extra standard hosting package for a .nl or .be domain will only cost € 29 (excl. VAT) for the first year and it will be only € 9 (excl. VAT) for a new .nl, .be or .eu domain. Of course, domains with other extensions can be ordered at a € 10 discount. Your maximum benefit can therefore go as high as € 100!

Rules

Offer period:                The offer runs from 5 December 2009 to 00.00 of 1 January 2010, when the fireworks go up.

Offer code:                  Before 5 December, VEVIDA will send you an email containing 10 unique codes. Each code will entitle you to a € 10 discount.

Transferability:              The codes can be freely transferred! That way, you can make someone else happy. Do you have a friend, family member, business colleague or someone you’d like to give this discount to? Give him or her one or more codes and they’ll benefit because you are a customer of VEVIDA. But remember: each unique code only works once!

Discount:                      These codes allow you to order 10 hosting packages and get € 10 off each one. The discount will be deducted once from the first invoice.

To order:                     You can order as usual at vevida.com and enter the offer code when prompted. The discount will then be deducted automatically.

Questions?

Please contact our customer service if you have any questions about this discount. You can reach CS on 050-5492234 (Netherlands) or 09-2185919 (Belgium). You can also ask a question using the Support window in MyVEVIDA.

We wish you an enjoyable festive season!

On 1 December, VEVIDA will start accepting advance registrations of the new .eu domains with non-Roman characters (IDNs). This will give you a better chance to secure your IDN soon.

From 10 December, EURid, the organisation responsible for .EU domains, will support so-called IDNs - ‘internationalised domain names’. These are domain names containing characters outside the standard Western character set. Examples: Swedish å, German ü, Romanian ş and letters from the Bulgarian and Greek alphabets.

IDN advance registration from 1 December at VEVIDA

There is no ’sunrise period’ for this introduction, where owners of particular rights (trademarks, etc.) are given precedence. It’s first come, first served. As an extra service, you can register your IDN domain with VEVIDA from 1 December. You follow the usual order and payment procedures to do this. Then, on 10 December, we file your IDN immediately after the new .eu registration system is up and running. Because it is technically possible for someone else to get in a fraction earlier, we can’t give you a 100% guarantee, but the chance of them getting in first with your IDN is virtually nil.

Additional information

You can order an IDN at vevida.com from 1 December. When we check the availability of an IDN, we also check whether your domain meets the preconditions for an IDN. The most important are:

• The domain uses only characters from the same character set (so not, for example, a combination of Latin, Greek and Cyrillic characters);
• The domain cannot begin with xn--;
• Not all characters are supported. German ß, for example, is not supported. See the list of supported characters for an overview.
• A domain cannot be longer than 63 characters after conversion to an ACE string.

An ACE string is what you get when the IDN you enter in the address line of your browser is converted to a form that the domain name system (DNS) understands. For example: the ACE string for the domain name ‘münchen.eu’ is ‘xn--mnchen-3ya’.

Because the IDN registration system will not be online during the advance registration period (1-10 December 2009), every entered and correct IDN domain will be available for registration. Whether that really is the case will, of course, only be clear on 10 December after official registration opens. If the domain name you submit has already been registered by another person, VEVIDA Customer Service will contact you to discuss further options.

Links for more information:

IDN checker:                          http://www.eurid.eu/en/eu-domain-names/idns-eu

Supported characters:              http://www.eurid.eu/en/eu-domain-names/idns-eu/supported-characters

Technical limitations:                http://www.eurid.eu/en/eu-domain-names/technical-limitations

FAQs:                                     http://www.eurid.eu/en/faq#IDN

As you can see, there are lots of rules for an IDN. It is also possible for an IDN ordered online at vevida.com to be accepted but later to be refused by EURid. We therefore ask for your understanding and cannot accept responsibility for this. If VEVIDA can ultimately not register your IDN, you will, of course, get your money back.

SIDN, the body responsible for the registration of .nl domains, is changing on 17 February 2010 to a new domain registration system (DRS5).

The most significant change in DRS5 will be the long-awaited EPP interface, something very important for VEVIDA. EPP stands for ‘extensible provisioning protocol’, the standard developed a few years ago to improve electronic communications between registrars (VEVIDA, for example) and registries (SIDN, for example). VEVIDA has been very heavily involved in this project and was responsible for a presentation to fellow registrars on this development. VEVIDA is, of course, fully prepared for the introduction of this change.

This development will also introduce a number of changes that are important for you as a user. For example, the current moving procedure will be replaced by a streamlined and more secure procedure. If you want to move a domain from one registrar/agent to another, you ask your old registrar/agent for a token  (a sort of authorisation code or password) to authorise the move. The result will be a simpler and more reliable system that makes handling moves more flexible.

And finally, WHOIS (request for domain name holder details) has been changed to comply with European guidelines for protecting personal data. After DRS5 is introduced, WHOIS will only return you the name and email address and not the street address, phone number and other details of the domain holder. This is only the case for domains registered by a private person. The holder details for domains registered by legal persons (by a company, for example) will still be given in full. Some authorised entities will still have access to all domain name details in order, for example, to be able to identify misuse of trademarks. The details of websites with illegal content should also be available to authorised entities.

If you have questions about this development, don’t hesitate to get in touch with our Customer Service.