Register.com is currently undergoing a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on a large part of its infrastructure. Clients that are fully managed by vOfficeware are not impacted. This information is useful to the hundreds of thousands of impacted customers of Register.com as well as any vOfficeware clients that are not fully managed by us that happen to have had the misfortune of registering their domain name with Register.com.

Step 1: Are you with register.com?

To check, visit http://www.whois.net/ and run a whois lookup on your domain name (the first option). If you are registered with register.com you will see something like:

Whois Server: whois.register.com

Referral URL: http://www.register.com

Name Server: DNS010.D.REGISTER.COM

Name Server: DNS014.B.REGISTER.COM

Name Server: DNS017.C.REGISTER.COM

Name Server: DNS174.A.REGISTER.COM





Step 2: Now what?

If you also have your website hosted with Register.com, there is not much you can do at this stage besides wait the attack out. Once the attack is resolved you may wish to consider changing providers. Register.com is a great provider, but after all is a budget host. They are a large target for attacks. A quick Google search confirms that this seems to be an annual event for them at the minimum.

Any host can go down from time to time. After all RIM’s Blackberry outtage, Twitter’s hacked home page, and Google’s App outage all make the rounds on the news. Even among the budget hosts, we recommend Dreamhost.com or Bluehost.com as they have a much better track record. If your website is critical to your business there are far more robust hosts out there.


If your website is not hosted at Register.com, we recommend you change your DNS servers as soon as possible. Some Register.com users can access their admin panel. If you are one of these lucky users go here: https://www.register.com/myaccount/productdisplay.rcmx, log in, select your domain and try to find the setting to change your name servers.



DNS Made Easy is our recommended provider of DNS services. DNS is what tells your web browser that www.vOfficeware.com points to this web site. it is one of the two critical pieces to ensure your site stays up and is accessible. It is generally a good idea to have a separate DNS provider than web hosting provider, especially when times like these occur. You will need to know the IP address of your website, not to mention other records like CNames and MX records to perform a shift. Usually your IT person will have this information available. Once all of this is entered in DNS made easy you will be given new name servers. Put those nameservers in your Register.com control panel.



We wish those Register.com customers a speedy recovery. Register.com has a good track record of recovering from these without data loss. The matter can be resolved today or it can take a few days. If the steps above do not help you recover right away, we encourage you not to give up. When service restores however, take swift action. Separate your DNS from your web hosting company and take more control over your infrastructure.