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:

1 Like
#5

An update from domains.coop:

Dear Domains.coop Resellers,

We wanted to take this opportunity to inform you that we are upgrading our storefront and user interface next week, on or on about 22 July.

The reason we are doing this is because we are upgrading our storefront development platform, which unfortunately has eliminated the reseller functionality.

Reseller accounts moving forwards

We wanted to offer you the following options with regards to how you can proceed:

  1. Have your customers setup their own independent customer accounts with Domains.coop, where the clients will continue to receive renewal notices and they manage their domains with us.
  2. We merge all of the domain names from your customer accounts into a single account that only you can make changes to. Only you will have access to the renewal notices and payment process.

Option 1 would require the end customer to share their login & password with you, if you will continue to provide technical support or managed services. Option 2 would require you to pay to renew the registrations, and send out your own invoices to the end customer to retrieve that money to be paid out for renewal (as you have been doing).

On 22 July we will be proceeding with Option 2 - all the domain names and associated WHOIS contacts under your current reseller customer accounts will be moved into a single customer account. If you would prefer Option 1 please note that the domain names can be moved into the separate customer accounts at any time once the new customer accounts have been set up on the new system.

We intend to contact all the remaining Ecohost / Domain.coop domain name holders to inform them that we are to request that domains.coop update all .uk domains to use the WEBARCHITECTS Nominet tag. We will encourage all non-UK domains to agree to a migration to our Gandi reseller account.

#6

We have written an email to all the owners of .uk domains registered via our Domains.coop reseller account based on this template:

The following domain name(s) are registered via the Ecohost / Webarchitects reseller account at domains.coop:

The option to have a reseller account at domains.coop is terminating on or about the 22nd July 2020 [1].

Domains.coop are not members of the UK domain name authority, Nominet, they use the YOURSRS-NL tag via their infrastructure provider in the Netherlands, this is the current Nominet tag for your domains(s), you can verify this here:

Webarchitects are members of Nominet and we will be contacting domains.coop on 20th July 2020 to ask them to transfer your domain(s) to the WEBARCHITECTS Nominet tag.

This transfer will not change the ownership of the domain name(s), it will not change the DNS servers that is used by the domain(s), it will not change the expiry dates of the domain(s) and it will not cost you anything, following this transfer Webarchitects will be invoicing you for renewals at £7.50 per year, per domain, as they become due.

If you wish for your domains name(s) to be transferred to a Nominet tag other than WEBARCHITECTS them please let us know which tag you would like us to use and we will transfer it.

[1] Impending transfer of the domains.ecohost.coop reseller account at domains.coop

And the following to non-uk domain name owners:

The option to have a reseller account at domains.coop is terminating on or about the 22nd July 2020 [1].

We therefore need to urgently transfer your domain, example.com elsewhere.

Our suggested option is our reseller account at Gandi.net, please let us know if you would like us to proceed with this or if you would like the domain transferred elsewhere.

[1] Impending transfer of the domains.ecohost.coop reseller account at domains.coop