Despite long periods of silence on this blog, you should know that NinerNet still exists and still operates.
While we believe that almost all clients have followed our advice and have moved their email hosting, we ourselves have not resurrected our email on our own domain, niner.net. So it may seem that we are dead, when in fact we are actually enjoying a much-deserved holiday after thirty years, and taking time to consider our next move(s).
We will post our plans here or on our primary blog, but for now I will say that our plan is to carry on as before. This means we will continue to provide the following services:
- Web hosting,
- DNS hosting,
- Domain registration and renewal,
- Dot-zm domain registration and renewal (needed special mentioning because we are a domain registrar), and
- Consulting.
That is, everything except email hosting. Many hosting companies have given up email hosting; we resisted for the longest time, rejecting the easy way out, but the last straw was when the mail server died on 19 March. It needs to be replaced, if only for our own email, but I refuse to take the easy way out and just outsource everything to Google, Microsoft, or even any other smaller (and well-deserving) companies, like Fastmail. I have never done anything that way, and I’m not ready to start now. Google and Microsoft are very actively in the process of setting up a duopoly, although each would (of course) prefer it was a monopoly, and all of the rules about the handling of email — particularly spam — are dictated from on high by consortia of big email providers that fund the operations of said consortia. Yes, that may sound rather conspiratorial, and it unquestionably is. On a technological level, “conspiracy” is required (it’s called cooperation to come up with the rules necessary to operate in the same environment), but on a competitive level, it obviously isn’t, and in the long term the market will rebel (or react against) the forming duopoly. How that will happen is beyond my ability to forecast, but for now it happens by people like me refusing to play ball.
However, apparently I need to provide a little education, because a lot of clients seem to have the mistaken idea that a “hosting company” is an all-or-nothing monolith, and because NinerNet’s mail server has failed, we have completely failed. That is not and has never been the case with NinerNet. It is true that we operated closer to that model in the beginning (in the mid-90s) when we were starting out, but we haven’t for years. (Our single server being hacked in 2005 taught us that lesson.) There are some hosting companies, believe it or not, that operate everything off of a single server. That means they provide all of the bulleted services above (and email) from a single control panel on a single server. That blows my mind. It concentrates all of their business into one, a single, point of failure. If that was us, we’d be dead today. As it is, our web and DNS servers are still running at 100%, continuing to serve websites and DNS.
This leads us to …
How to configure your domain
Under the assumption — which is true for most of our clients — you are hosting everything (Web, email and DNS) with NinerNet, your first choice is not to transfer your domain registration to a new company and have them manage everything according to their (not your) wishes. Sure, you can, and we’re obviously not going to stop you, but if you want to actively and thoughtfully manage your domain, that’s not necessarily your first and only choice.
The simplest thing to do, when you sign up with Company A, is to have them provide you with the new MX record (or records) they need you to use; you then enter that into your domain’s DNS in the DNS control panel, replacing your old “mx.niner.net” entry. They may require you to enter a few more records — e.g., TXT (SPF) records, etc. — which you also need to enter, probably replacing entries that were used for your NinerNet email. Under our default DNS settings (TTL, or time to live), your new entry will go live in 10 800 seconds, or three hours. As you know, if you understand DNS, this might mean your new settings may take effect immediately, or in three hours, but at most three hours.
That’s it. You don’t have to change or set anything else, unless you move your email hosting again, or your provider requires you to change your settings. In reality, the latter almost never happens.
There are other ways to do things, of course, and if your new host insists on their way or the highway, follow their instructions. Presumably you want to set up a long-term relationship with them, and part of that is taking their advice if it honestly given.
One thing we have noticed, among dot-zm domain holders, is that clients (registrants) do not seem to be aware that only “registered Zambian ISPs” are able to register dot-zm domains. This is not our rule, it is ZICTA’s. So if your South African web designer — who almost invariably doesn’t actually know how the Internet works, but only knows which shade of green looks good on your website — suggests you need to transfer your domain registration to a South African ISP, you can’t, you can only transfer it to one of about a dozen or two Zambian ISPs, and almost without exception those Zambian ISPs provide atrocious customer service. So we suggest you leave your domain registration with NinerNet/Preworx, and manage your DNS through our DNS control panel, or have us change the nameservers to your new host’s preferred nameservers, in which case you will manage your DNS through their control panel.
You have the full ability to fully manage your domain. We have always provided this ability with every domain we host. Remember, it’s your domain as long as you’ve paid to register and renew it, and you’ve kept it updated as your contact and technical information has changed.
