Last year Vodafone announced that it was shutting down thousands of email accounts to keep up with the change in technology. Now the telecommunication company has announced another shutdown, this time all web, email and domain hosting services are affected. We explain what this means for you and your business.
What’s happening?
Basically, Vodafone isn’t making any money out of these services and have made a decision to close them all down. Most of their email and web hosting services were developed more than 20 years ago, which in technology terms might as well be the stone age. In November last year, Vodafone took the first step by closing down email addresses using ihug.co.nz, clear.net.nz and vodafone.co/net.nz
This time Vodafone is taking it a step further, closing down its web and email hosting services as well as domain name registration and domain name hosting (DNS) on 28th February 2019. This will allow all affected customers to move their services to new providers. Personal homepages have already been shut down, with services turned off on 30th November 2018.
What can I do about web hosting?
You will need to move your web hosting services to a new provider. Before you do so, backing up your data is a must or you risk losing it. This will require some time, so we recommend to get started as soon as you can to ensure all your web content is moved before Vodafone shuts down their servers.
If you had a website running on Vodafone’s personal home page service and have already backed up your files, we can offer you website hosting. But if you don’t have a copy of your website, we can possibly retrieve the information for you still and rebuild your web pages.
Back up your data. If you can, download all content of your website onto your computer, including files, graphics and HTML.
Record information. This might be time-consuming, but in order to move things as smooth as possible, we recommend to write down specific configuration settings that you will want to keep in place after changing providers. If you’re not sure what you need, ask us.
Alert users. If things don’t go as smoothly as planned, you will want to be prepared. Make sure your clients and customers have your contact details in case your website goes offline during the transition. Communicate the change so they’re not panicking if they can’t find you. We’ve had personal experience of Vodafone not clearing their records properly and blocking our phone number!
Change your domain name records. You will want to keep your domain name, but since the domain is now hosted on a different server, you need to update your records. This can happen within an hour but .com domains can take up to 2 days, so you need to allow plenty of time for the transition. We can help you with this.
Cancel your account with Vodafone. This step will be taken care of by Vodafone, so you won’t have to worry about it. We just need to ensure that all glitches are removed and your website is working properly on the new server.
What is domain name registration and hosting?
When you create a website, you need to give it a unique address such as www.energise.co.nz. If you had your domain registered with Vodafone, your domain will be affected by the latest shut down. If you had your website running as a personal page on a domain name owned by Vodafone, we will need to register a new domain name for you.
What you need to do
Transferring your domain is a fairly easy process. All you need to do is contact us and request the change-over. This process can take anywhere from an hour to a few days, so you need to plan ahead.
What is email hosting?
Vodafone basically rented out their email servers for you to use. Unlike free webmail sites such as Yahoo or Google, as a business owner with Vodafone you would have been able to purchase a more sophisticated email domain such as you@yourcompany.com rather than using you@vodafone.co.nz. These email servers will be shut down, which means your email won’t be functional after 28th February 2019 unless you take action. We can help you set up your emails with us if you also host a website with Energise Web.
What you need to do
Changing private email accounts is fairly easy. Choose a new provider, check if your username is available or choose a new one and you’re good to go. You can forward important emails to the new account manually.
However, as a business account holder things get a bit more complicated. Changing your email host without losing important emails and being able to keep your business name is tricky, but not impossible. We can assist our clients to transfer existing email accounts to a new email account and move existing emails that are still stored on the Vodafone mail servers.
Need more help?
If you find the whole process too daunting or overwhelming, the team at Energise are happy to help you. We offer comprehensive web hosting services that can cater to your needs and budget. Feel free to give us a call today and we can talk about how to best support your business in the future.