For some time I suspected that DNS provider Zerigo was no longer a priority for their parent company after they were acquired by VOIP provider (and easyDNS client) 8×8 back in 2011. This sort of thing happens all the time, company gets acquired, parent switches direction, some of the acquisitions get left out in the cold. It happened to Zoneedit (more than once) until we picked them up in 2014 and now keep it running as a standalone unit.
We saw the opportunity to do something similar with Zerigo. I tracked down Thomas Morgan, the original Zerigo founder, who generously gave me his time to outline the backstory behind Zerigo’s sale to 8×8, what the original rationale was and what happened (TL,DR – new 8×8 CEO switched directions and focus).
He also provided me with a senior level contact there and we began a conversation in late 2016 around the possibility of easyDNS acquiring Zerigo. It never got to the stage where we even put numbers around it but there seemed to be receptivity to the idea. In early 2017 we received word that the company was too busy to consider this at the moment and could we revisit the issue in mid-year?
This morning word began trickling in that 8×8 has announced Zerigo end-of-life for April 30, 2017, so it seems that’s the end of that idea.
So what now for Zerigo users?
If you’re looking for a place to land now, we’ve setup a code “zerigo” on our Zoneedit unit (follow this link) and create an account and you’ll get 10 free zones while we figure this out. Zoneedit is non-anycast (for now), if you use the zerigo vcode link above then you can delegate to:
dns1.zoneedit.com
dns2.zoneedit.com
dns3.zoneedit.com
dns4.zoneedit.com
If you were using Zerigo’s geoDNS implementation and need that, then go with easyDNS, where we’ve been running our new geoDNS implementation for www.php.net for quite some time. GeoDNS bundles with the Enterprise DNS service level.
That’s really a ridiculous story. They must be very rich when they are too busy to sell the company and throw it and the customer stock away instead – for absolutly nothing.
But I will remember the name 8×8 and give them a wide berth because they even didn’t care about their customers and how much work and time wasting they are them causing. We had to transfer all domains manually because – surprise! – the AWS API of zerigo does NOT work.
I’ve read this articles too late, when we already made all necessary steps to move to AWS. Otherwise we would have taken your generous offer perhaps.