Australian Domain Registry Migration is here

There’s two days to go until the world’s biggest ever domain name migration, as we recently discussed here. It’s time to put on your helmets and stock the bunker! On June 3o, Afilias are going to migrate 3.1 million Australian domain names from AusRegistry, over to their own data centre servers and cloud systems. This past Saturday, exactly one week before the huge migration, Afilias officially stated on their blog: Transition Weekend Coming Soon!

We’re ready to go! We’ve undertaken extensive testing, and everything is ticking along nicely. We provide lots of detail to registrars about what’s being undertaken as we orchestrate this historic transition – or, as we put it, our Sydney Opera House production – in a recent blog. We’ve gathered contact details from all registrars so we can keep them all up-to-date on each milestone during transition weekend and reach them when it’s time to lift the curtain and go live! Importantly, and this isn’t just reserved for transition weekend, we have technical support available 24/7/365. Yep, they’re there in the unlikely event that you’ll need them. Our Melbourne-based team will check in with registrars once we go live. They can’t wait to make that call!

I guess we’ll all be happy campers come Monday morning… or not… Once complete, it will be the first time in 30 years that Australians residents can renew domain names for 1 year, or 5 years! Domainer wishes Afilias, auDA, Netfleet, Drop.com.au and all the Registrars the best of luck over this important weekend for Australian domain names. I’m sure the entire industry is aware there could be a week or two after this weekend, when teething problems have to be ironed out. In the meantime, if you haven’t renewed your domain names that are expiring over the next few weeks, I suggest you DO THAT TODAY. Who knows if everything is going to work properly next week? That goes for DNS changes too. Make those changes today, if you need them changed.   LATEST NEWS ON DROP CATCHING I spoke with Nikki from Netfleet today and they have to literally write a new drop-catching program, pretty much from scratch. The entire Australian Domain Name Registry system is changing. PLEASE KEEP THIS IN MIND. Netfleet have officially released this statement:

Hi Domainers The registry transfer is taking place this weekend, please note the following: 1. Registry Downtime Registry services will be down from 8am this Saturday (30th June) to 8pm Sunday (1st July). This means that during this time you will not be able to renew, transfer or make changes to your domain names. 2. Domain Renewals If your domain name expires this week or next, please renew it before 29th June. Send us an email at support@netfleet.com.au if you require assistance. 3. Drop Auction To ensure data integrity after the transfer, there won’t be any drops for up to 14 days after the transfer takes place. It is possible that the drops will be reinstated before the end of the 14 days but a date has not yet been set. The daily drop list will still be published, all domain names will drop on the first day of reinstatement. Don’t hesitate to email us if you have any questions. Kind regards The Netfleet Team

During this time, a simple way for you to keep up to date with the Daily Droplist is to use the NameBid system. In NameBid, as long as you’re LOGGED IN, you can give a GREEN TICK to the domain names you are interested in, and then these will be saved every day into your WATCHLIST that only YOU can see. To access the daily drop-list on NameBid, simply click on DOMAINS and .AU DROPLIST from the top left menu bar. At the end of the 14-day blackout, you’ll have your complete list of domain names compiled in NameBid in your WATCHLIST, and you’ll be ready to make your bids on Netfleet. I personally use the NameBid system everyday on my mobile phone to choose my drop-domain-names. I hope we can have the NameBid Daily Drop system working properly for you on Monday… Next week is going to be VERY INTERESTING for Australian domain names 🙂