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.

Not this kind of cloud or flare.

After careful consideration, we have reluctantly taken the decision that the use of Cloudflare will not be supported on our Web and Email Hosting service. First two clarifications:

• This only applies to our Web and Email Hosting services. It does not, and will not, apply to virtual servers (VPS), dedicated servers or Raspberry Pi servers.
• We have never formally supported or encouraged the use of Cloudflare with our Web and Email service. Until now, we have generally discouraged it, but we’ve tried to accommodate users who chose to use it.

The problem

As we’ve written about previously, we’ve seen a huge increase in the amount of abusive bot traffic hitting our web servers — much of it badly behaved AI scrapers — and frequently the volume of traffic is such that it overwhelms the server, and makes websites unavailable. At times we’ve seen over 95% of traffic coming from AI scrapers. Our Web and Email Hosting service is what’s often referred to as “shared hosting” meaning that we have websites for many customers on a single server. This is a very cost effective way to provide web hosting, but it does mean that any load issues caused by traffic to one website can affect other sites on the same server.

Our primary tool for dealing with abusive traffic is to identify the source of traffic and block the IPs that it’s coming from.

Cloudflare provides a service that seeks to protect websites by blocking abusive traffic. It does this by operating a “reverse proxy”; rather than web traffic arriving directly at the web server, it is instead sent to Cloudflare’s servers. Cloudflare inspects the traffic, filters out the abusive traffic, and then forwards the legitimate traffic to the actual web server. This has the effect that all traffic arriving at the web server appears to come from Cloudflare’s IP addresses, rather than the actual client IPs.

Some of our customers have chosen to front websites hosted on our shared hosting servers with Cloudflare. The problem is that Cloudflare isn’t perfect; it doesn’t succeed in filtering out all abusive traffic. This is particularly true of the free tier that we tend to see used in conjunction with our Web and Email Hosting service.

Unfortunately, when we see a large volume of abusive traffic arriving via Cloudflare, we are faced with a choice: either we block Cloudflare’s IP addresses, knowing that this will take all websites using Cloudflare completely offline, or we accept the traffic, which potentially has an impact on all websites hosted on that server. With the growth in volume of abusive traffic, we are being forced to make this choice increasingly often.

We have now taken the decision that we will treat Cloudflare’s IPs like any other IPs: if we see abusive traffic from them, we will block them. In the future, we may introduce a permanent block, or redirect traffic to a support page on our site that explains why Cloudflare is not supported on the service in order to avoid customers inadvertently using an unsupported configuration, but we will contact customers who appear to be using Cloudflare prior to taking this step.

FAQs

Obviously these questions are not frequently asked as this is the first announcement of this change, but whatever; here are some questions and answers:

What have you got against Cloudflare?

None of this is a criticism of the service that Cloudflare provides. The same would apply to any reverse proxy service placed in front of our servers that prevents us from seeing the actual source IP, thereby removing our ability to effectively filter traffic ourselves.

We do have concerns about any service that breaks the end-to-end encryption of web traffic, but that’s unrelated to this issue. Cloudflare (and any other such service) relies on terminating the TLS connection from the client on their servers, inspecting the traffic, and then making a new secure connection to the target web server.

Why do you think you’re better at this than Cloudflare?

We’re not, but when a particular attack is affecting our ability to provide our web hosting service to hundreds of customers, we’ve got a much stronger incentive to resolve it quickly.

Cloudflare definitely has some very impressive technology, but we suspect that much of it isn’t provided in the free tier of their service. Upgrading to a paid-for tier, or careful configuration of the free tier, might yield better filtering, but in our case, we’re affected by the most permissive configuration; it only takes one customer to point Cloudflare at our server with minimal filtering and we’ve got a mix of legitimate and abusive traffic arriving from the same IPs and we’re back where we started.

Cloudflare includes the client IP address in an HTTP header – why don’t you filter on that?

Filtering based on the source IP address of a TCP/IP connection can be done very efficiently because you only need to look at the packet header. Filtering based on an HTTP header requires accepting the connection, setting up a TLS connection and decrypting the content, and then parsing the headers, which is a significant overhead, and in extreme cases, the load from doing this is prohibitive.

Can I use Cloudflare on my VPS or dedicated server?

Yes, absolutely. The issues described here that make Cloudflare such a problem for our Web and Email Hosting service don’t apply to VPSs and dedicated servers, so if you want to put Cloudflare — or any other reverse proxy — in front of your server, you are free to do so. Of course, dealing with any abusive traffic that slips through is your responsibility.

Can I use Cloudflare on my managed server?

If you have a managed server with us then we will attempt to resolve any load issues caused by abusive traffic as part of this service. Please do not install Cloudflare (or similar) in front of your managed server without discussing it with us first, as it will hamper our ability to respond to any incidents. A special case is our WordPress Shared tier of managed WordPress hosting. As the name suggests, this is implemented on our shared hosting platform, and so we cannot support the use of Cloudflare with this service.

VMHaus implemented Pay just before you Go.

In 2018 Mythic Beasts acquired VMHaus, a small provider of very low cost virtual servers.

As an independent virtual server hosting provider, VMHaus was not financially viable. Post acquisition, we significantly reduced the costs of running VMHaus by using economies of scale from Mythic Beasts. We could recycle retired servers and disks from Mythic Beasts into VMHaus making their hardware effectively free. We provided rack space and transit from Mythic Beasts data centre space at cost price, taking advantage of Mythic Beasts economy of scale and buying power. However, an energy crisis and high inflation post-Covid meant that VMHaus would likely never become financially viable and in 2024 we took the decision to close the company. We gave all VMHaus customers six months notice to migrate to another server, with an offer of discounted hosting in the Mythic Beasts cloud.

VMHaus ran used a pre-payment model; customers had to buy credits in advance, then use up the pool of credits by running virtual servers. If your credits ran out, the servers stopped working and it was your responsibility to refill the meter before this happened. They also had some neat technical features we’ve incorporated into the main Mythic Beasts cloud – per-second billing, cloud-init for customising installs at boot and fully private network segments for each virtual server with IP address portability.

The pre-payment model made the shutdown of VMHaus a bit more complicated as VMHaus held funds that would not be used prior to the shutdown of the company. In order to refund unused credit, we needed customers to tell us where to refund it to, so in order to put a time limit on the wrap-up, we gave customers with positive balances a choice: get a refund, or donate the balance to the NLNet Foundation, defaulting to the latter if we don’t hear from you. The credit balances were typically very small, and in many cases, the accounts had been inactive for a number of years. Donated balances were each rounded up to the nearest dollar, reflecting the fact that this option saved us PayPal payment fees.

The NLNet Foundation funds projects that create and maintain key internet infrastructure – the sort of software that VMHaus and Mythic Beasts rely on.

We’re very pleased to say a large number of customers actively asked us to donate their balance, and combined with the balances from customers who didn’t respond to our many email reminders,we ended up with a final balance of $5240. We rounded this up to €4550 and sent it to NLNet Foundation.