A2I Communications

2022 good wishes + final tapering of A2I Communications

General
#1

Wishing all users a happy new year.

A2I Communications will be doing a “final tapering” starting today, January 1, 2022.

This means that we will be phasing out all custom domain support by the end of March 2022. However, all rahul‍.‍net domain features will remain valid for the foreseeable future. The intention is to encourage you to migrate your custom domain services to some other reliable service provider, while preserving all URLs and email addresses in the rahul‍.‍net domain.

After the end of March 2022, all URLs and email addresses that use the rahul‍.‍net domain will be forwarded in some manner so that websites and email addresses continue to remain valid for a reasonable amount of time, designed to cause as little disruption in your life as practical.

There is no guarantee that your data will be saved or backed up in any manner beyond the end of March 2022. Therefore please take appropriate steps to download any valuable data by then.

Our billing system will continue to bill you if needed for past charges that might have remained unpaid, but there will be no new charges or bills generated for service between now and the end of March. (If you get any invoices accidentally generated for service beyond January 1, 2022, please let us know and we will undo them.)

After the end of March 2022, you might get billed a very modest amount for maintaining any rahul‍.‍net URL or email address.

If you have any custom domain of the form *.us.com, those will remain valid for the foreseeable future, but you will still need to migrate services to outside rahul‍.‍net just like any other custom domain.

The intent behind all of the above is to gracefully end all services without excessively inconveniencing anybody who has relied on the existence of the rahul‍.‍net domain.

Note: Edited to change 2021 to 2022.

#2

I’m confused about what this “final tapering” means. As this was posted 4 days ago, I presume you mean starting January 1, 2022. Correct?

Does the “phasing out all custom domain support” mean dropping connections of custom domain names to web sites hosted on the aqua-new.rahul.net server? Or is this “tapering” referring to dropping support for pre-migration services?

Is this pushing stragglers to Virtualmin, the cloud etc. which we’ve migrated to? Or is this shuttling down the .onthisweb.com infrastructure that we just set up a year ago.

I’ve got to be missing some important context for this announcement.

1 Like
#3

Sorry for the ambiguity. Final tapering essentially means going out of business, but gradually and in a manner such that little or no disruption will be caused to customers.

Between now and the end of March 2022 (not 2021, that was a typo, now fixed), service for any domain that you own should be migrated away from A2I Communications to any other service provider of your choice. This applies to both the Classic Linux and the DirectAdmin environments.

Please begin the above migration at your earliest convenience. This gives you three months. Please choose a new service provider that will give you sufficient technical support to make your transition smooth and without problems.

Any *.us.com domain on which you depend will be eventually repointed to your new service provider’s DNS servers. Your rahul‍.‍net email if any will be forwarded to your new service provider, and your www.rahul‍.‍net website hits if any will go to your new service provider. Details to be announced as they become relevant.

#4

I was afraid it might mean that. Ah well, it was a long ride. (Longer perhaps than even my stay with Best before they were bought out by Verio.)

Do you mind if we start a thread in this forum regarding recommendations for new hosting providers for us to migrate to?

1 Like
#5

Please feel free to discuss new hosting providers, add topics, etc.

#6

I’m almost sure rahul‍.‍net has been the longest lasting domain on the Internet that is still in operation with the same or similar services as when it began.

3 Likes
#7

Really sorry to hear this. Thank you very much for all your years of providing a really great service!

2 Likes
#8

Out of curiosity, where/who is physically hosting aqua-new and serving the .onthisweb.com infrastructure “in the cloud” today?

#9

Cloud servers are on Upcloud (aqua-new for Classic Linux, jade-new for DirectAdmin, discourse for forum, bolero for DNS), Vultr (hustle for DNS), and DigitalOcean (orange for DNS). Also have a minimal administrative cloud server on Google Cloud.

1 Like
#10

will you be announcing when and how to manage email forwarding from rahul.net email addresses?

#11

Email. I have not yet set up any mechanism for forwarding email. Once it’s in place you will see an announcement. However, I would like to know who needs what. Depending on how much demand there is for specific features, I will need to arrange for suitable long-term server capacity.

Bounce aliases are easy to set up. For details please see:

https://info.rahul.net/bounce_alias

Your mail is not lost, but the sender knows where you moved to. No spam-filtering is needed.

Normal forwarding of email will unfortunately also forward spam. Setting up spam-filtering of forwarded email requires server resources, which will likely become too expensive for me in the long run.

I recommend that everybody wanting email forwarding provide me with some indication of how much mail forwarding you want, whether bounce alias or normal forwarding, and for how long. Then I can decide what type of server resources will be needed. You can post here or send your requests to our support email address (which you can find if you look inside info.rahul.net).

URLs. As for redirecting URLs, once again, I would like some indication of who needs what, so I can figure out what mechanisms and server resources will be needed. Again, you can post here to send to our support email address.

#12

Hi Rahul,
Yes, I am definitely interested in email forwarding for my rahul email address. thanks.

#13

I would be interested in normal mail forwarding, for as long a time as possible. I have had the rahul.net address for decades and it is in lots of places, so keeping the address for as long as possible would be optimal. Thanks.

Doug

#14

I’m in the process of transitioning over to a new email address, but my rahul.net address is also in lots of places, and it’s taking time to transition. So forwarding might be a necessity for me too.

#15

I am also in a similar situation.

#16

I’d like email forwarding also. There will be only residual email left but it will take a while for a final mop-up.

#17

Thanks for the comments. I will begin on April 1 by gently disabling all user-owned domains not provided by A2I Communications. I will try to make this reversible, so anybody taken by surprise can re-enable the domain and then migrate it out.

Once all user-owned domains have been removed (in the next week or two), I will then work on the mail forwarding. A2I Communications-provided domains (rahul‍‌.‌net, onthis*.com, *.us.com) will continue to work normally for now, until proper mail forwarding etc. has been set up.

Our support email responsiveness has been a bit slow lately. I will go through pending requests and process all of them in the next few days.

#18

I’ll need forwarding from https://www.rahul.net/flash/<path> and https://www.rahul.net/flasheridn/<path> to https://www.panix.com/~flash/<path>, for twenty-seven years of bookmarks. (I only publish my http://pobox.com/~flash redirector, but that doesn’t affect bookmarks.)