‘Todays fish is trout a la creme’. (Red Dwarf, 1988, Balance of Power).

We are committed to providing support delivered by real humans. We know how frustrating it can be to have to fight your way past chatbots and virtual assistants that can’t help you in order to get to a human that can.

In fact, when you contact us, your message will be dealt with not only by a human, but by one of our technical staff who, on other days of the week, will be managing our routers, running our DNS servers, developing our control panel and maintaining all our other infrastructure.

LLMs break processes designed for humans

Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) are very impressive, and we know that many people find them useful in spite of their inherent and well-documented unreliability. One of the downsides of LLMs is their ability to produce large quantities of text that can overwhelm processes that are built to deal with human input. This is being seen in many places, from bug bounty programmes being DoSed by LLM-generated submissions, to schools unable to cope with a huge increase in the volume and size of complaints from parents.

We’ve now started to see this in our support queries. Fortunately, the volume is not yet problematic, but we have had cases where we’ve spent a disproportionate amount of time dealing with LLM-assisted ticket submissions. This includes time spent trying to decipher what the question actually is thanks to LLM-induced obfuscation, and also time spent answering tickets that are just much longer than they would have been had they been written by a human.

Dealing with LLM-generated support queries

Our target is to respond to all support queries within one working day. Providing a 100% human support response on this basis simply doesn’t work if support requests are being generated automatically. Therefore, we have amended this target to exclude queries that we believe have been generated by an LLM; if you submit a support request which we believe has been made harder or more time consuming to answer by the use of an LLM, we may reject it and ask you to resubmit a human-authored request instead.

If you want to use an LLM to help solve your query yourself that’s great. But if that’s unsuccessful, please don’t send us your LLM output as a support query; send us your input – your prompt – instead.

Rather than pictures of text, we prefer actual text.

We’ve recently updated the look and feel of our homepage. All the work has been done in-house by our own staff, and we’re hopeful that other organisations might steal some of our unusual ideas:

• No pop-ups; any feature requiring a cookie banner will not be permitted, and you definitely won’t be pestered to join a mailing list.
• The website should clearly state what services we offer and how much they cost.
• The website should be fully accessible.
• No third party dependencies – everything is served from a mythic-beasts.com domain on servers we own and operate.
• Minimal number of HTTP requests and small pages so our front page is faster than the home page of high performance content delivery networks.^*
• No existing feature should stop working as a result of the redesign.
• Works perfectly for an IPv6-only user.

In updating our homepage, we’ve tried to better describe what it is that makes us different and in order to backup our claims of “fair, no-nonsense pricing” we’ve now documented our pricing policy in unnecessary detail.

We are always adding features to our website and control panel, and over the last year we’ve had a particular focus on improving accessibility. We now have an internal instance of Pa11y which automatically checks our pages for accessibility issues. Pa11y caught an accessibility regression in our rollout which we’ve now resolved. If you do encounter accessibility issues on our site, please do report them.

We’re also in the process of updating our website to consistently show prices inclusive of UK VAT, and have now done so on our homepage. For historical reasons, we’re not consistent on this, although we do always state which one it is. VAT treatment is always tricky, as many of our customers are not in the UK and thus may pay a different rate of VAT, or no VAT at all, and we also have many VAT-registered customers who prefer ex-VAT prices. Showing VAT-inclusive prices can make us look more expensive compared to our competitors – always check that you’re comparing like with like.

* We measured our homepage at about 300ms, compared to 2-5s for popular content delivery network homepages we compared with.

Taking the tree theme to heart, Dam Designs have built the core structure direct from the forest. The ducks have gone but beavers are in.

We’ve been to Robocon again this year, renewing our sponsorship of the Dam Designs team (formerly Little Devils) and their redesigned autonomous self-driving robot. The team is now a mixture of primary and secondary school students and with several years’ experience behind them, they took on 16 teams in this year’s more difficult arena.

Each robot is allocated a quarter of the arena, and the goal is to get as many points as possible by collecting cubes and dropping them in their own quarter of the arena. Bonus points are available for dropping cubes in the smaller “home area” within the quarter, or stacking cubes on top of other cubes. Four green cubes start in the central neutral zone and part way through the competition, higher scoring red cubes start to drop one by one. For full details see the competition website.

Is it a bug or a feature?

In the quarter final, the team pushed a code update to prefer picking up the higher scoring red cubes. Unfortunately it didn’t quite go to plan, and by mistake they coded their robot to ignore the lower scoring green cubes entirely. This resulted in a heart stopping moment at the start of the competition where the robot drove to have a view of the neutral zone and then stubbornly sat still while all the competitors cleaned out all the low scoring cubes. As soon as the high value red cubes were dropped the robot rushed in to collect them and take them home, neatly winning the round.

Whilst this wasn’t the intended behaviour of the code, it turned out to be a very good strategy for winning the round. A debate within the team followed: patch the code to try and get extra points from a green cube, or eat sweets and re-enter the winning robot for the semi final unchanged? The engineering conclusion was WONTFIX and the robot won the semi-final too.

Robot collecting a red cube and returning to base and stacking on a green cube for double bonus points

Third place

In the final the team got unlucky; the robot spun the wrong way and spent a very long time staring at the wall instead of looking for a cube in the neutral zone. Whilst the robot very slowly turned itself around, the competing robots picked up the green cubes and collected some points. In the final seconds our team’s robot spotted a red cube and rushed towards it but was powered down by the end of the round before it was able to fetch it.

We have consistent fair pricing, rather than just giving the fat cat what he wants.

We’ve posted previously about our refreshingly boring approach to domain pricing – we take the price that our supplier charges us, add a little bit more than it costs us to provide the service and sell them on.

We’re pleased to say that we’ve recently crossed the top volume threshold with our biggest domain supplier, meaning that the price that we’re charged for many domains has gone down. So, we’ve run the script, regenerated our price list and have reduced our prices for the vast majority of Generic TLDs (gTLDs) and non-UK Country Code TLDs (ccTLDs). For example, .com domains have dropped in price from £14.50+VAT for one year registration/renewal/transfer to £13.50+VAT.

We’re proud to provide a sustainable, no-nonsense approach to pricing. We don’t mess around with loss-leading first year pricing that needs to be clawed back through inflated renewal pricing or a hard sell on add-on services that you don’t really need.

The new prices apply to renewals and transfers as well as new registrations, and to new and existing customers alike. Our new prices can be viewed at mythic-beasts.com/domains.

We’re delighted to announce that we’ve renewed our silver sponsorship for Electromagnetic Field 2026. We’re also providing EMF with internet transit and backup services in our virtual server cloud.

EMF is a long weekend camping in a field which is filled with approximately everything. Last time we saw huge tesla coils, a paper rocket factory, and active satellite tracking amongst many other things. The various attendees have had two years to build on the learnings of Astrophysics for Supervillains so we are nervously looking forward to the results.

The field comes with everything the modern camper needs: not just power and internet but space to pitch your tent, a 2G GSM phone network and a full copper phone system. You can bring and use your own fax machine or classic Nokia GSM phone.

Lots of our staff members are looking forward to a fun weekend.

Sometimes it feels like https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/ was mistaken for a design manual.

We’re committed to making the internet less annoying. We don’t have a cookie banner on our website – we don’t need one because we don’t track you – and we also won’t hassle you to review us every time you interact with us.

But review sites exist, and we know that many people do look at them, so we’re very grateful to the customers that have left us some truly wonderful reviews on TrustPilot and elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the flipside of not constantly nagging our customers to review us is that the volume of reviews that we receive is relatively low, and a small number of negative reviews can have a big impact on our overall score.

After a five-year run of nothing but 5* reviews on TrustPilot, we recently received a couple of suspiciously similar 1* reviews within the space of a week. The reviews are light on details, and the reviewers have not responded to our request via TrustPilot for more context for the reviews.

Various aspects of the reviews make us believe that these reviews are not from people who have had any genuine experience of Mythic Beasts but have in fact been commissioned by a disgruntled third party. You can see the details, and our response, on our TrustPilot page. You can also see the significant impact that it has on our overall score, which is amplified by the weighting that TrustPilot give to more recent reviews.

We have flagged the reviews and provided TrustPilot with details of why we believe that these reviews cannot be genuine, and why we believe that they are “incentivised”, both of which are against TrustPilot’s Ts&Cs, but despite the reviewers’ refusal to provide any details to validate their reviews, TrustPilot have thus far elected to let the reviews stand and have only provided us with automated or templated responses.

Not the data centre.

We acquired our Amsterdam presence in 2017 as part of our acquisition of BHost. We integrated it into our core network and migrated all customers onto our own virtual server platform.

Since then, we’ve refreshed much of our London data centre space with our data centre expansions to Telehouse and City Lifeline including moving to fully-routed networking.

Our Amsterdam site was next in line for an upgrade, but it’s location presented some logistical challenges. Firstly, it’s a bit tricky for us to get to. Secondly, the Amsterdam data centre freeze meant that we couldn’t follow our preferred approach of deploying new kit in an adjacent empty rack, migrating, and then decommissioning the old space. The upgrade had to be done in-place, which is unavoidably more disruptive.

In order to minimise the impact of this, we ended up doing the vast majority of the work in a single, overnight session.

The end result is a very substantial upgrade to our Amsterdam site. As well as the deployment of our new networking platform, the virtual server hosts have been replaced with faster, more power efficient models. Existing customers have been live-migrated onto the new servers which feature all NVMe storage for much faster IO. In the new year, we have further capacity due to be installed and we will fully decommission the previous generation of servers. Whilst using low carbon energy to power servers is good, not using energy is even better.

This upgrade was months in the planning, including co-ordinating shipment of the new servers from a local supplier, and working closely with Equinix staff to perform the PDU swap. An earlier preparatory trip to (amongst other things) identify the best local pizza suppliers was also essential. We’re very grateful to the staff that put in some very long hours to make it go so smoothly.

Something something domain parking

We are now an Accredited .ie Registrar, meaning that we can offer our no-nonsense approach to domain registrations on all .ie domains.

Are you fed up with companies that offer discounted initial registrations followed by inflated renewal prices or a hard sell on extras that you don’t need? Transfer your .ie domain to us today.

Our .ie domain registrations include all of our usual domain registration features including:

• DNS hosting, with easy zone import and export
• Powerful DNS API
• DNSSEC support
• Dynamic DNS support
• No lock-in
• Great support

… and of course, our refreshingly boring pricing.

Residency requirements

.ie domain registrations do require that registrants have a “Connection to Ireland”. Being a resident, or having a registered Irish company immediately ticks this box, but there are other ways to qualify.

We currently handle new domain registrations manually. You can order via our website, and we’ll be in touch with any details needed to prove your connection to Ireland.

Transfers

.ie domain transfers are really fast and simple:

1. Get the auth code from your current registrar.
2. Make sure your domain is unlocked.
3. Go to transfer domain on our website.
4. Enter your domain name.
5. Choose how long you want to renew for (between 1 and 9 years).
6. Enter your auth code.
7. Give us some money.

The domain transfer should complete immediately.

As with most domains, the period that you select when transferring is added to your current expiry date, so the transfer doesn’t really cost anything, you just pay for your renewal early.

Pricing

.ie domains are one of the few TLDs where we do charge less for new registrations than renewals, but that’s only because the .ie registry charges us less.

We charge £15.50+VAT for a one year registration, and £21+VAT for a one year renewal or transfer. There are some decent multi-year discounts available: a ten year registration costs just £101+VAT, and a nine year renewal/transfer costs £123+VAT.

Another feature killed by Google.

A recent Google support article has quietly announced plans to drop POP3 support from Gmail in January 2026. On the face of it, this is no big deal. For most purposes, POP3 has been pretty much replaced by IMAP anyway, but there’s a more important change buried in the article.

The issue is confused by the fact that Google use the “Gmail” name to refer to two completely different things:

• The Gmail mobile app that lets you read email on your phone and tablet.
• The Gmail web interface that lets you read email in a browser on your computer.

The Gmail mobile app lets you connect to multiple different mailboxes, and will continue to do so, just not with POP3. IMAP is much better for this purpose, as it supports mail folders, and properly supports access from multiple different devices, so the removal of POP3 support here is no big deal. If you use the Gmail app to read mail in a mailbox hosted with Mythic Beasts, it’ll continue to work just fine.

The significant change is this one:

• The option to “Check mail from other accounts” will no longer be available in Gmail on your computer.

“Gmail on your computer” is Google-speak for “the Gmail web interface”. The “Check mail from other accounts” option is a feature that allows you to pull in mail from other mailboxes and drop them straight into your Gmail inbox. It behaves as if you had just forwarded mail from your other address to your Gmail address, but with one crucial difference – it works reliably.

As we discussed in a recent blog article, efforts to make it harder to spoof email have also made it much harder to forward email reliably, and until now, the “check mail from other accounts” feature has been our recommended way to “forward” mail to your Gmail inbox.

Hopefully Google will contact users to tell them about the change, but we are also doing some log analysis and will be contacting customers who appear to be relying on this feature to collect mail from their Mythic Beasts mailboxes.

Customers who are currently using this feature will either need to revert to simply forwarding emails to Gmail — with the associated risk that Gmail may reject some of your legitimate email – or switch to a different webmail platform. And on that last point, we’re working on a refresh of our own webmail platform that we’ll be announcing in the near future.

The DNS Fund exists to help maintain these critical projects. (Image xkcd 2347; CC BY-NC 2.5)

One of our founders, Pete Stevens, has joined the expert advisory panel for the Nominet DNS Fund. Nominet are intending to distribute £370,000 to open source DNS projects.

The fund has a very simple goal, to improve security and sustainability of open source DNS projects. The means is similarly simple, make it as easy and straightforward as possible for open source critical infrastructure components to access needed funds.

We’re excited to be able to help to steer the fund. One thing that attracted us was the implementation goal of ‘Minimum Viable Bureaucracy’; the application form must be short and it must be simple to complete. The fund wants to fund people and organisations that are good at writing and maintaining software, not specialist form fillers. An individual applying has to answer eight questions and a maximum of 2000 words. We enthusiastically encourage answers that are short and to the point (not least because Pete will have to read them!).

We’re also overjoyed that the fund can consider ‘boring’ applications. Maintaining a project or bringing more developers in to ensure long term sustainability of a project are things that are in scope. The fund does not require new features and new code; fixing and improving existing code is fine. The fund will also be able to support projects that are dependencies of DNS projects, as well as those which directly relate to DNS.

The application form is here. Please share with any project that is in scope and would benefit from funding.