The two companies share an owner; NameZero.com acquired them in May last year.
NameZero.com remains online and accessible.
The two companies offer Domain Name Server (DNS) hosting to customers who have registered their domain name with them. Their DNS appears to be down, so Internet users cannot access their customer's Web sites or send them email.
Domain Name Servers match domain names to numerical IP addresses, somewhat like a phone directory.
A message was posted to the MyDomain forum Web site that apologised to customers, and made reference to a problem with a firewall.
"We have a fail-over for the firewall, but this appears to have suffered the same fate," it said, without telling customers precisely what that "fate" was.
DNS networks are among the most complicated and difficult to deal with on the Internet, with changes made to DNS "entries" or domain name delegations sometimes taking days to trickle through the Internet and take effect worldwide. Even if the problem is fixed quickly, it may take a while for service to be restored.
Ironically, the MyDomain.com Web site is available by its numerical IP address (http://216.34.94.184/) but not by its domain name.
MyDomain.com and NamesDirect openly boast that they host 600,000 domain names. NamesDirect.com claims to be the 10th biggest Domain Name host in the world, and is an ICANN accredited domain name registrant.
I am one of those folks who experienced this issue firsthand. I have two domains registered with NamesDirect.com. I don't believe the "outage" issue was with the DNS as much as it was with web and email forwarding.
I use "cloaked" web and email forwarding on both domains that I manage. This means all requests go to NamesDirect and are forwarded along to the proper domain or email address. When the NamesDirect site went down, so did all forwarding capabilities. Now that the NamesDirect site is up and running, web and email forwarding "appear" to be running smoothly again. This is not the type of change that requires 48-72 hours to propogate over the internet.
As a side note, I have been experiencing technical issues with NamesDirect since the end of October or beginning of November. I first noticed an issue when I had difficulty logging in to manage the forwarding on my acounts. It took several weeks for the issue to be resolved. The company did ultimately follow up on my email.
During the past several weeks I have experienced latency issues with email forwarding. I emailed the company over a week ago and to date, have not had a response.
I'm not sure what's going on at NamesDirect, but it appears that they are upgrading and experiencing technical issues along the way. Good business practice dictates they should communicate to their customer base about what is happening so that we can have a Plan B in place!