We are in the process of making some changes that will result the technical operations of the AC.ZA DNS registry being outsourced. TENET will remain the Registry Operator, Administrator and Moderator of the AC.ZA domain, but https://dns.business will operate the underlying technology under contract.
Existing AC.ZA domains will continue working throughout the transition, and no specific action from you. However, in order to smooth the transition we need to introduce a temporary change freeze in the existing AC.ZA registry: no non-essential changes will be made to AC.ZA domains until the transition is complete; emergency changes to delegations can still be made. We expect this hiatus to be lifted towards the end of June.
Our current registry system was developed in-house in 2001, and runs on a dated platform we can no longer maintain. By contrast, the platform we're changing to brings a number of benefits for AC.ZA domain holders:
- Better conformance with the .za Domain Name Authority's (.ZADNA) technical standards for second level domains.
- RFC and ICANN-compliant WHOIS and RDAP services. This is something .ZADNA has been asking us for for some time, and means the interface at whois.ac.za will change.
- More resilient nameserver infrastructure, including more anycast nameservers.
- Support for Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC), including signing of the AC.ZA zone.
- Ongoing development to keep abreast with current best practices.
By way of background, https://dns.business are the South African-based Domain Name Services Pty (Ltd), and their newly-formed parent company DNS Africa. They are the commercial development arm that spun off ZA Central Registry, which in turn came from Uniforum. As such they are the underlying developers associated with the DNS registry software running .ZA, .CO.ZA, .NET.ZA, .ORG.ZA, .WEB.ZA, .AFRICA, .DURBAN, .CAPETOWN, .JOBURG, and .LAW.ZA.
