31 July 2009

CIS Update, Getting On With Life

Posted by Connor under: Clinton; Internet; Iraq .

Just got back from the KROS studios in Clinton where I was talking about what options are available to CIS subscribers and businesses. No announcement yet from CIS.

The curious thing, which I mentioned on the radio, is that CIS has significant assets both physical and virtual and could very easily sell the business to another provider or allow someone to come in and run the business for a fee. None of it makes much rational sense. But then everyone kind of knew that Bob always did things for his own reasons.

Here are your options:

If you are an individual subscriber to CIS with just cis.net e-mail on the line

I advise you to get with Iowa Telecom, Qwest or Mediacom and get on with your life. Unless CIS comes back up for some period that will allow customers to make an orderly transition, there is no way to access e-mails, address books or web pages on those servers.
If you like webmail, get a Yahoo or Gmail account and get on with your life. Hopefully, you have a local copy of frequently used e-mail addresses and you can send a message to friends and customers that your address has changed.
If you have web pages that you don’t have a local backup for, check the Internet Archive for a recent copy of your web page. You should be able to suck down most of the content from there.

Business customers. CIS registered its own and its customers’ domains with Network Solutions LLC one of the major domain registrars. Get a copy of a billing statement from CIS that specifically states that you were charged X for registering and/or hosting your domain.
Call Network Solutions at 1-800-333-7680 and explain what has happened and that you would like the administrative records for your domain transferred to your control
Be patient and work the process. Network Solutions has had its own problems with customer service in the past.
If you still run into a brick wall or you feel like going after CIS for loss of business, call a lawyer that has familiarity with Internet and intellectual property law. I have been using Des Moines attorney, Brett Trout as my resource on this issue. He gave a presentation at Ignite IT in Ames a couple of years ago and I was quite impressed.

Riverfront Technology is partnering with a Quad Cities-based web hosting and web development company to offer migration assistance and new virtual digs for homeless CIS domains. My advice here is that if you have a business that relies on the web and e-mail for day-to-day transactions don’t wait for Network Solutions, register a new domain now, get your web site back up and running. When you finally get your old domain back, it can be merged with the temporary one so that it will appear to be transparent to the user regardless of whether they use olddomain.com or newdomain.com.