It’s been a long time coming, but we’re now pleased to announce that we’ve got DNSSEC support in public beta, and you can enable it for your domain at the click of a button.

What is DNSSEC?

DNSSEC is a set of extensions to the DNS protocol that ensures that you can trust the IP addresses that you get back from the DNS system. For example, if you visit www.yourbank.com, the first thing that happens is that your browser uses a DNS server to find out the IP address of your bank’s web server. But how do you know that you can trust the address that you get back? Your request will probably get bounced through multiple DNS servers, such as your home router, your ISPs servers, and finally the authoritative server for the domain. If any one of those gets compromised (and let’s face it, home routers have a terrible security record) it could easily insert a different IP address and direct your request to an entirely different server.

DNSSEC means that all responses are signed with encryption keys that have been lodged with the registry, so you can’t inject bogus responses just by compromising an intermediate server.  Of course, the system only works if the systems making the requests check the signatures of the responses that they receive, something which certainly doesn’t happen everywhere yet.

Sounds complicated?

Yes it is, particularly as it is recommended that the encryption keys that you use are changed (or “rotated”) regularly. Fortunately, we’ve now automated all the hard stuff, and if you’ve got your domain registration and DNS hosting with Mythic Beasts, you can make DNSSEC go just by hitting a big green button.  We’ll take care of the rest:

Unlike some people, we believe that the internet should be a safe place to do business by default, so this service is, and will continue to be, provided at no extra cost.

If you want to try it out, simply visit our control panel, find the domain under “My Domains” and follow the “DNSSEC” link.

You could save as much as this by renewing early

On 1st March, Nominet (the UK domain registry) are raising their wholesale prices by 50% for all registration periods except 1 year registrations (which are rising by less, but are currently disproportionately expensive), and we will be applying corresponding increases to our prices for these domains.

If your domain is due for renewal in the next six months, you can save a few quid by renewing early.  You can renew your domain in advance for up to nine years.

Our new and old prices are as follows:

Nominet are celebrating 30 years of .uk with a buy one, get one free offer on .uk domains. The offer applies to one and two year registrations of new .uk, .co.uk, .org.uk and .me.uk domains bought within a 7 day period.

If you’d like to take advantage of the offer, simply register the first domain through our website in the normal way, and then email us with the name of the second domain you’d like to register.

We’ve also got promotions available on lots of other domains. The discounts offered vary quite a lot by registry, particularly when it comes to multi-year bundles. Some of the best discounts are available for .beer, .host and .site.

Please see our Domains Page for the full list of current discounts.

0. We sell domain names

OK, we lied, it’s six reasons, but the first probably isn’t very compelling so let’s get it out of the way first: buying domains gives us beer money.

Obviously we’ve got a commercial interest here, but Mythic Beasts exists because a bunch of students spotted that their university-provided email addresses would stop working once they graduated. We’ve now had the same personal email addresses for over 15 years.

1. Provider independence

This is the big one. Changing your email address is a massive pain. Not only do you need to tell all your human correspondents about your new address, but you need to tell just about every site that you’ve ever logged on to. Most sites use your email address to identify you, and that’s the only address that you can get a password reset sent to if you forget it.

Not so long ago, many people used the “free” addresses provided by their broadband (or dial-up) provider. This had the obvious problem that changing broadband providers meant changing your email address. Having your own domain puts you in control.

2. Real provider independence

Realising the problem of having your email address tied to your connectivity provider, many people have switched to using an address from a free email provider such as Gmail or Yahoo!, but this is really just moving the same problem elsewhere: your email address is now tied to your email provider.

What happens when you get fed up with the amount of advertising you’re exposed to in order to fund your “free” email account? Or your provider changes their email policy in a way that causes your address to be banned from mailing lists? Or you discover that the provider’s anti-spam policy is binning your legitimate email? Or they simply change their web interface in a way that you don’t like?

By using your own domain name, you retain choice of email provider.

3. Disposable addresses

It’s hard to do anything online without being asked to provide an email address, but how can you trust that your address isn’t going to be added to a spam list? If you have your own domain, you can have as many addresses as you want. You can even have “wildcard” addresses so that you can make up new addresses on the spot. For example, if my address is paul@example.com and I want to sign up to a service at www.somedodgysite.com, I could invent an address of:

paul-somedodgysite@example.com

If I start getting spam sent to that address then firstly, I know which site lost or sold my details and secondly, I can easily setup a rule to bin all mail to that address.

4. More interesting and memorable addresses

Unless you’re lucky enough to have a particularly uncommon name, any address you can get at the big free mail providers is likely to be some complex variant of your name. With your own domain name, you’ve got complete control. You could even have just a single letter such as p@example.com.

This also means that it’s less likely that your email will end up in someone else’s inbox by mistake. If one of your friends forgets that you’re joebloggs1937@gmail.com rather than just joebloggs@gmail.com, the email will get delivered to someone else. With your own domain, it’s far more likely that typo-ed addresses will get bounced, and the sender will notice the mistake.

5. Domains are cheap

EDIT 22/2/2020 – prices have gone up since this post was written, but domains are still cheap.

We sell UK domains for just £6+VAT £12+VAT for two years. £3.75 £7.20 is a year is a tiny price to pay for being in control of your own online identity. There’s also now a huge variety of generic top-level domains that can be had for not much more – .beer, .bike, .click, .cymru, .engineer, .guru, .scot, .wales, .wtf and hundreds more.

Of course, to use your domain, you’ll need somewhere to host it. We can sell you a hosting account too, but you don’t have to use us if you don’t want to. That’s the point!

We’re please to announced that we can now set DS records for any domains registered with us.  At present, only UK domains can be configured  through the control panel.  For any other domains, please email support and we’ll put the records in place for you.

Control panel integration and other DNSSEC improvements will be coming soon.

Back in 2000, Mythic Beasts started by offering web and email hosting services on a single shared server. Since then, we have expanded in just about all possible directions, but we still offer shared hosting for web and email. It remains the most cost-effective way to establish a permanent online presence.

A single Mythic Beasts hosting account can support multiple domains. This has become particularly important with the current proliferation of new top-level domains, and the opening up of the second-level .uk domain space. With our shared hosting, you can have example.com, example.co.uk, example.uk, and example.club all hosted on a single account. And you can choose between serving the same content, redirecting to a canonical name, or serving different content.

Until now, enabling additional domains has required an email to support and a manual step at our end to link the new domain to your hosting account. But our dev team has now exposed this through the Customer Control Panel, and you can add your new domains instantly.

Here’s how it works now.

1. If you have registered a domain through us, you can add the standard configuration through the Customer Control Panel. The standard configuration sets up the “bare” domain name, example.com, for web and email hosting, and www.example.com for web hosting. There is no charge for this, and you can add as many domains as you like to your hosting account.
2. For all other cases, whether subdomains, or domains registered with other registrars, you will still need to email support. A one-off setup charge of £10 (inc VAT) will be levied per domain /subdomain. Or you can batch up to 5 domains in a single request for £20 (inc VAT). EDIT 2021: This is no longer the case, additional domains and subdomains are free to add and this can be done through the Control Panel.

It is now possible to register domains directly within .uk, and not just under second level domains such as .co.uk, .org.uk and .me.uk.

Holders of existing .co.uk domains (or .org.uk if the .co.uk is not registered) are given the right to register the corresponding .uk domain. For example, if we owned example.co.uk, we would be automatically entitled to register example.uk.

If you already hold a .co.uk or .org.uk domain, either with us or with another registrar, and would like to register the corresponding .uk domain with us, then please contact support. Tell us the domain or domains you want to register, and for how long (up to 10 years) and we’ll do the rest!

If there is no existing .co.uk, org.uk, etc. domain which corresponds to the .uk that you want, then you can go ahead and register the domain with us in the normal way.

The new domains cost the same as the other domains within .uk: £6.50 for 1 year, £9 for 2 years, £21.50 for 5 years, or £39 for 10 years (prices include VAT). They come with all the standard benefits of Mythic Beasts domain registrations: DNS hosting including IPv6, SPF and TXT records, DNS API and Dynamic DNS.