Impending transfer of the domains.ecohost.coop reseller account at domains.coop

Systems
#1

I have just sent the following email to all our clients at http://domains.echost.coop/

I’m contacting you because your email address is listed as the contact address on the domains.ecohost.coop reseller account that Webarchitects inherited when we merged with Ecohost.coop in 2013.

Our management committee has taken the decision that we no longer wish to have a reseller account with domains.coop and we are in discussions with them regarding them taking over the direct management of the service, we don’t yet have a date for this handover.

If you choose to do nothing then at some point soon you should be able to have a better service from domains.coop as we will no longer be a middle man in the relationship. You will continue to have a web interface to manage and pay for your domains.

Alternatively, if you would like, Webarchitects could take over the management of your domains, for .uk domains we would transfer them to our Nominet account and for other domains we would use our Gandi.net reseller account.

Webarchitects does not offer a web based interface for managing domains like the domains.coop one, we have two options:

  1. We do everything for you, if you need changes to your zone files you ask us to update them and depending on the amount of work involved we might charge for our time to do this. This is a good option if you don’t understand how the Internet domain name system works and if you want someone else to sort everything out for you.
  2. We let you do everything yourself, we give you access to an account on git.coop and you use Git to manage your raw Bind zone files. This is a good option if you know what you are doing and want total control of your DNS setup, we would suggest that this option is only sensible for people with a good technical understanding of the Internet domain name system.

For more information see:

The primary reason we are closing our reseller account is technical, not political, we do continue to be a strong supporter of using the services of other co-operatives wherever possible.

If you have any question please contact us by email, support@webarchitects.coop.

#2

We haven’t been allowed to close our reseller account at domains.coop and they have been unable to migrate domains to their own account.

As soon as there are no domains left on the account we should be able to shut it down, but there are still people using it who appears to only be spurred into action when their domains lapse… This isn’t ideal but I’m not sure what else we can do.

It has been posted to the CoTech forum that from 1st May 2020 domains.coop are closing down their email and web hosting service:

Note that they are suggesting that people migrate to a non co-operative hosting service.

#3

Ouch, that part is disappointing

#4

A few updates on this, there is now a page on domains.coop mentioning the email and hosting service termination and a page on the CoTech site:

And a page on the Co-operatives UK site:

And a thread on the ICA forum:

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