Host.ie Novara.ie and Digihost Go AWOL

Earlier today one of Ireland’s oldest hosting providers seems to have gone completely offline.

The company in question is Host.ie, which is also known as Novara or Digihost. Over the better part of 20 years the provider has changed hands a couple of times, as well as its name. These days it’s known as “Hostopia Ireland”, after the company was acquired by American provider Deluxe Corporation. It had previously been taken over by Digiweb (now Viatel).

Right now anything hosted by the company OR using their DNS is unreachable.

From my calculations the outage impacts around 12 thousand domain names between .ie and .com, as well as other extensions.

This isn’t the first time the company has had an outage, nor is it the first time where its clients have had difficultly reaching the company.

IEDR are facilitating .ie domain name registrants who wish to move their domain(s) elsewhere:

See more

In light of https://t.co/POcSOy7ouU and https://t.co/8IYqAHXQ2s being unavailable, affected domain owners can request their authcodes by emailing registrations@weare.ie. In the email please confirm the name, address and email attached to the account.

— .IE (@dot_IE) October 13, 2021

While that might help some people there will be many whose contact details are all tied back to the domains hosted by the provider who is currently offline. For the .com domain names it’ll be a little bit more complicated. As far as I know most of the domains they were selling were via a Tucows / OpenSRS reseller account. Tucows does offer a provider lookup on their site and they will assist people if the provider is unresponsive, however while it might be frustrating the outage is still being counted in hours not days, so they may not be in a position to help yet.

For *.uk domain names you can go directly to Nominet who have a process:

If, however, your current registrar is unable to complete this change for you, you can move your domain name to a new registrar using our services which comes with a fee of £10 + VAT (you can do multiple domain names if they are moving to the same registrar). You can log in to our Online Services to start this process.

Basically that means you can pay £10 + VAT to move all your domains to another registrar if you need.

UPDATE: Host.ie and related sites as well as DNS servers came back online around 5pm Irish time on Wednesday afternoon. It’s unclear