My role was largely to figure out the strategy for us and them and manage all the operational details across both sites. Now we are in the technical execution phase, the strategy is largely in place.
Right now we are porting Distribute.IT's application and data to a clean and sandboxed location that we can completely control. We believe we can have the existing Distribute.IT domains system up, running out of Sydney by this afternoon (Friday, 24th June). So people using the API to that system, or the system generally will have domain management.
In parallel we are looking at exporting the data into the Netregistry Group console in case Plan A fails. Again, so customers will have at least some management capability available immediately.
The Distribute.IT system is a short term solution. We can't manage large numbers of applications, so I think it's fair to say retirement is likely in the medium term, and the system will be replaced by something equivalent or better. And again clearly communicated and well in advance of any changes. Just like we did with every other migration we've undertaken within Netregistry Group.
We are replicating shared hosting, that hasn't been lost, across to Sydney. For sites that are up and running, we'll announce further details – I don't believe there will be downtime (or at least significant downtime) while we port. This will be happening through next week.
We are reviewing the lost data to see what can or can't be recovered. In the meantime we'll provision new hosting accounts on the console for those clients, give them logins and invite them to load anything they have available in addition to creating mailboxes etc. If we can salvage user data, we can provide that. Again a set of processes that will happen over the next week. Though hosting accounts will be available tomorrow.
Co-lo clients are running and up, so we are reviewing that today, once a plan is drawn over those clients, we'll announce. Likewise on clients on VPS solutions.
We are still working on Registry access for a number of spaces to allow our Customer Service staff to manually manage domains on request.
People are asking about pre-paid credit. Again we need to look at the gross value of that credit and devise a plan. We'd ask for a bit of patience, the technical and communications side of things are the priority, the administration side will be closely reviewed next week. Again clients with pre-paid credit will be identified and communicated with, probably on a case by case basis either late next week, or early the week after. I would say there Netregistry has not purchased liabilities in Distribute.IT, so what we offer there will be as goodwill, not a legal requirement. Having said that we'll do the best we can for everyone in this sorry affair.
