All .web.com domains will cease resolving (ie, working at all) from the end of the month. This basically kills off any sites that use these domain extensions stone cold dead, with little option but to buy a new domain name and frantically redirect as much traffic as possible.

What I don’t understand is why web.com (who lease out, if you like, extensions of their own domain) have decided to kill off this revenue stream. CentralNIC were handling everything on their behalf and would presumably pay web.com for the priviledge of doing so, yet the new owners have essentially said they don’t want this anymore.

This is a copy of the email I received:

> Hello,
>
> We are writing to you because you have one or more .web.com domain
> names registered with 123-reg. We are sorry to inform you that as of
> March 31 2008, .web.com domain names will no longer resolve.
>
> This means that any website located at an address ending in .web.com
> will be unreachable at that address. It is also now not possible to
> renew .web.com sub-domains.
>
> We're really sorry about this: unfortunately the issue is out of our
> control. We've explained the full reasons for it below.
>
> You will need to move any affected sites to new domains before the 31
> March 2008. You can register an alternative domain for your site for
> free (as long as it is available) - please read on to find out what
> to do next.
>
> WHAT'S HAPPENING
> ----------------
>
> CentralNic is the global domain registry for many types of domain
> name. In December 2004, the owners of web.com asked CentralNic to
> operate the .web.com domain registry on their behalf.
>
> All .web.com domains purchased through 123-reg are administrated by
> CentralNic, and .web.com is the only sub-domain CentralNic has ever
> offered that they did not own or directly control.
>
> CentralNic agreed to operate the registry in good faith, based on the
> fact that web.com had managed it themselves for the preceding 6
> years.
>
> However, the web.com domain is now owned by somebody different. These
> owners have announced that, as of 31 March 2008, they will no longer
> offer domains ending in .web.com

Although it has not been possible to buy a .web.com domain for quite some time, it was at least possible to renew an existing one in order to carry on running whatever business was involved. Now that’s all out the window and a lot of people will be left up the creek without the proverbial paddle, since popular domain names that were still available as .web.com domains are pretty much sold out.

Thankfully I have been able to snap up MYDOMAIN.UK.COM as a replacement, though this is UK-Centric and not as generic as its predecessor, but I still have to recreate all the sites on that domain (it was a generic word that lent itself to multiple subdomains quite nicely) and redirect everything – an intensive excercise whichever way I look at it.

Another site I am involved with which currently uses COMPANY.WEB.COM already owns COMPANYWEB.COM and can use that, but the stationery, business cards and advertising all feature the .web.com address which – from the end of the month – will be quite useless.

It will be interesting to see what the outcry is on this.