Please note, that I have been cleaning up some domain renewals today. There is good news and bad news.
Bad news:
- The last six months have been a nightmare, to say the least. NinerNet has been (and still is) on life support. The primary reason is because we haven’t been able to invoice for anything, and yet our suppliers still expect to be paid. We’ll eventually invoice for the web hosting that we still provide, and we’ll also remove those domains that have been moved from our systems (you know who you are).
- One of the ways in which we have failed some clients is (or was) domain renewals. We are aware that we have allowed 11 domains to expire. This is a major failure on our part, one we prided ourselves for avoiding for over thirty years. But in those 11 cases, we lost the domains, one by only a couple of hours. That’s unforgivable, and inexcusable. In a few cases those domains seemed to have been abandoned because the owners didn’t take action when our mail server failed, and they didn’t follow our instructions to set up new email on their domain. This was surprising and shocking at the time, but in those cases we don’t feel too badly. But in the rest we do.
- In some cases we realised the problem too late to do anything while we still had the domain under our control, but we realised it soon enough to put in what’s called a back order for when the domain finally and fully expires and is “dropped” by the domain registrar. When that happens (in the next 11-18 days), we will re-acquire the domain at our expense (we have a 100% success rate so far) and set it up with whatever hosting was in place when our mail server failed.
Good news:
- All dot-zm domains under our control have been renewed over the last six months, even if we have not invoiced for the renewal of any domains. When our invoicing system is working again, we will invoice for the renewal of those domains. In two cases these domains have been removed from our registrar account with no notice to us. This surprises us, because this is not how registries (i.e., ZICTA) are supposed to operate, but in both cases those domains seem to be operating, so our reseller must have taken the responsibility upon themselves lacking any feedback from us or a way to contact us.
- All domains that expire up to about a month from now have been renewed.
- When our billing system is back online, we will invoice for some services (namely domain renewals) that we have not invoiced for yet. We will invoice for web hosting as of the date our new invoices go out, but not for web hosting over the last six months in most cases. It turns out there will be no charge for those six months in most cases; we provided the servers, but we won’t charge retroactively.
We will have email on our own domain (niner.net) working again in the very near future, but we’re not committing to a date as of this moment. At that point you’ll be welcome to inundate us with your questions at the same addresses you used previously.
