Netregistry this morning revealed it had acquired fellow domain name specialist and web hosting company Distribute.IT, offering the beleagured company’s customers a lifeline following the destructive hack of its servers over the past few weeks.
Distribute.IT on Tuesday revealed that the sites and emails of about 4,800 domain names and accounts hosted through on its infrastructure were now considered “unrecoverable”, following a disastrous hack on the company’s servers that had targeted storage drive header files, with the intent of doing maximum damage. At the time, the company advised affected customers that it had “little choice” but to help them transfer to another provider.
Netregistry said in a statement today that it empathised with the situation which had led to the acquisition, and felt that its position in the industry (Netregistry is one of the largest of web hosting domain name sellers in Australia) meant it was able to offer a stable solution to the thousands of customers affected by the Distribute.IT outage.
“We all have a great deal of sympathy and concern for the consequences to Distribute.IT staff, management and customers of this unfortunate incident,” said Netregistry chief executive Larry Bloch (pictured). “It is important to us that all Distribute.IT customers know the extent of the effort to which Distribute.IT have gone to rectify the damage. Distribute.IT had a very solid reputation — that comes from doing a good job for a long time,”
“Without that, I’ve no doubt that this situation could be a lot worse. I want to remind customers of that excellence and ask for their patience and support as we work through the requirements to return services to all customers as rapidly as possible.”
From today, all of Distribute.IT’s customers will be given the option of switching their services to Netregistry’s load-balanced infrastructure in the massive Global Switch datacentre in Sydney’s Darling Harbour, with payments for hosting at Distribute.IT to be honoured. Netregistry has also offered to waive customer charges for the time being.
“While we are assessing billing and payment history, we are giving all Distribute.IT customers a free hosting service as soon as humanly possible,” said Bloch, “so that they can upload their site and get their email addresses working. Please bear with us as we have had 24 hours to prepare for this situation.”
The acquisition has also been supported by domain name regulator .au Domain Administration, with the organisation’s chief executive Chris Disspain noting in Netregistry’s statement that he was pleased that the trio of organisations had been able to cooperate effectively and arrive at an arrangement that was consistent with auDA’s goal of ensuring the ongoing stability and security of the .au domain space.
Affected customers have been asked to contact Netregistry on 1300 711 044 or visit a special web site set up to assist with the migration.
Image credit: Netregistry
Wow, that was quicker than I expected. Bet they got it cheap too.
Fire sale fire sale. I am sure they got it for a bargain. Apparently they had 7% of the domain or hosting market. Pretty good swoop for NR.
Great opportunity for NR but a bigger wake-up call to all hosting companies that they need to be on their game even more when hackers are out there trying to make a name for themselves.
It is a wonder which hosting company would have survived such as attack. Would NR have been able to restore all 4800 sites. Businesses need to ask the right questions and then put the necessary plans in place to protect themselves and their information.
Really what protection or recourse to do you have when your hosting company calls and says it is all gone, sorry. Remember it is your data.
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