Via a number of discussion groups and email lists, I received the following bulletin from Michelle Sullivan, founder of the Blocklist SORBS, regarding the upcoming closure of this service.

SORBS is currently looking at a sale of the services, hardware and code base – and according to their website “A number of offers have already been made, we are evaluating each on their own merits“.

Posted in full blow with permission:

All,

Please feel free to forward this message to any other location/mailing list.

It comes with great sadness that I have to announce the imminent closure of SORBS. The University of Queensland have decided not to honor their agreement with myself and SORBS and terminate the hosting contract.

I have been involved with institutions such as Griffith University trying to arrange alternative hosting for SORBS, but as of 12 noon, 22nd June 2009 no hosting has been acquired and therefore I have been forced in to this announcement. SORBS is officially “For Sale” should anyone wish to purchase it as a going concern, but failing that and failing to find alternative hosting for a 42RU rack in the Brisbane area of Queensland Australia SORBS will be shutting down permanently in 28 days, on 20th July 2009 at 12 noon.

This announcement will be replicated on the main SORBS website at the earliest opportunity.

For any hosting suggestions/provision, please be aware that the 42RU space is a requirement at the moment, and the service cannot be made into a smaller rackspace without a lot of new hardware, virtual hosting is just not possible. The SORBS service services over 30 billion DNS queries per day, and has a number of database servers with fast disk to cope with the requirements.

Thank you for all your support over the years,

Michelle Sullivan