Distressed domain hosting outfit Distribute.IT and its offshoot Click n Go customers and assets have been acquired by Netregistry Group, the largest domain group in Australia.

"We want to help affected customers get back online as quickly as possible and vow to honour all existing Distribute IT hosting accounts and payments," Distribute.IT said in a statement. The web host on Tuesday informed customers who had 4,800 sites hosted on a number of its servers that their sites and emails were "unrecoverable".

"We are aware that many Distribute.IT customers have lost backups of their websites. Regrettably it may be impossible for us to retrieve your files, however we will give you tools to get a website online as soon as you receive login details to our system. If your web designer has a backup of the site, FTP access will be provided to upload the content," the troubled domain registrar and web host added in a statement announcing the sale to rival Netregistry.

Netregistry said it will be assisting with resources and solutions to all Distribute.IT customers in distress following the extremely unfortunate recent hacking attack.

Netregistry said that as a strong market leader within the industry, it is in a position to offer a stable cloud infrastructure solution to the thousands of customers whose business and livelihoods have been affected.

Talking about the acquisition, Larry Bloch, CEO of the Netregistry Group says "We all have a great deal of sympathy and concern for the consequences to Distribute.IT staff, management and customers of this unfortunate incident. It is important to us that all Distribute.IT customers know the extent of effort to which Distribute IT have gone to rectify the damage. Distribute.IT had a very solid reputation - that comes from doing a good job for a long time. Without that, I've no doubt that this situation would be a lot worse. I want to remind customers of that excellence and ask for their patience and support as we work through the requirements to return services to all customers as rapidly as possible."

This arrangement is supported by .au Domain Administration Ltd (auDA), the .au manager, which has been working closely with Distribute IT management and Netregistry to ensure a satisfactory outcome for affected customers.

All of Distribute.ITs customer base will be given the option of moving their services to that of the Netregistry Group.
Mr. Bloch said 210,000 domain names were registered through distribute.IT and its resellers but most of these were unaffected.

Larry Bloch adds "We will honour all payments for hosting at Distribute.IT, but whilst we are assessing billing and payment history we are giving all Distribute.IT customers a free hosting service as soon as humanly possible so they can upload their site and get their email addresses working. Please bear with us as we have had 24 hours to prepare for this situation. "

Neither party disclosed the terms of the sale or customer numbers.

A report by the Register said that hacker group LulzSec took down Distribute.IT. LulzSec over the past month has hacked Sony Corp., the U.S. Senate, an FBI affiliate, the Public Broadcasting System, gaming sites, and online porn sites. It said over the weekend that hack attacks will continue until "we're brought to justice, which we might well be."