On the 1st of July, Australia’s online space will be going through its first big shakeup in more than a decade, changing the way we register, renew, and manage Australian domain names (.COM.AU, .ID.AU, etc).
The Registry Operator Is Changing
After more than 15 years of championing Australia’s online space, AusRegistry will be passing the digital flame over to one of the largest registry operators in the world, Afilias.
Afilias is the world’s second-largest domain name registry, managing more than 20 million domains across dozens of different extensions.
More Flexible Billing Periods
As a part of this transition, multi-year registration periods will be made available for all Australian country code top-level domains giving you the freedom to register or renew any domain name that ends in ‘.au’ for your choice of 1-5 years.
Your Website Won’t Be Affected
We imagine the process involved in transitioning the data of Australia’s 3+ million active domain names will be fairly complex and require a lot of double, triple, and quadruple checking…
As such, downtime at the registry level has been scheduled to begin at 8:00am on Saturday the 30th of June and is expected to be complete at approximately 8:00pm on Sunday, the 1st of July.
During this time, pending transfers, renewals, and change of registrants may be affected and the new registration of any Australian ccTLDs will be unavailable. There will also be a 14-day period where domain purges will not take place, giving registrars the chance to verify data integrity and help mitigate any potential issues after the transition is complete.