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Network Solutions Take 2
sirkin writes "Washington Post Technews is reporting that VeriSign is resurrecting the Network Solutions name with a new subsidiary responsible for domain name registration. It seems so eerily familiar."
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Among them are the hassle-free domain transfer as well as the "helpful and targeted" informational mailing sent out on the daily basis to thousands of small site operators by their "trusted partners".
Ñ'
If this move improves Verisign/Network Solution's customer service for domain names and DNS management, I'm all in favor. Although that service has been pretty abysmal, I get the impression they are genuinely trying to do better. I signed up for their Advanced DNS Manager for one of my domains after 24-hour failure at DNSMadeEasy made me nervous. The overall reliability and redundancy of Network Solutions' DNS servers appears to be outstanding, but the site for editing DNS records has sometimes been unavailable. At $24/yr/domain, all parts of the system should work all of the time, in my always humble opinion. ---- This is not really a sig.
Sigmund
Plus lets look at it from a pure financial arena. Back in "the day" Network Solutions was basically the only place to grab a domain name, but that's not true anymore. Check This out for a little taste of why NetSol is screwed in the market. I remember switching from NetSol, to register.com to finally, Tucows OpenSRS which is dirt cheap. But NetSol is like the microsoft of the DNS world where people know it as being fairly big and its security sucks.
With the trtouble to get MY OWN DOMAIN out of their database, I hope they go bankrupt and never set up anytype of ecommerce site again. Does anyone have anything positive to say about netsol, I mean they really were and are a horrible company that overprices everything. I mean look at verisign now, the prices for a "virtual certificate". Insane.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
That's funny, because it sounds so true.
My employer has been trying to the get organization name changed on our domain name since Network Solutions put the wrong one on the domain. That was Feb 14, 1995! Yes, it's been almost eight years, and they still haven't been able to fix a simple text record associated with a domain name. We've jumped through the "create a fake letterhead with the invalid name on it and FAX it to us" hoops several times for nothing. What do you have to do to get them to listen? Eight years!
"Network Solutions" has been a very sincere curse around our company ever since I went through hell and back getting our domain name registered (around 1994). We had 'gsti.com' at the time, 'gst.com' had lapsed about a year previously but not been officially released by the previous owners, and NS refused to transfer the registration without an email or a fax from the previous owners (as opposed to their current policy of allowing transfer within 30 seconds of lapsing). I finally had to track down the previous holders and beg and plead them to send a fax, as their company and its email services were long since defunct.
I'm no longer a sysadmin around here, but the people who are admins respect my opinions, and we will deal with a reconstituted "Network Solutions" over my dead body. How they can think that that name has any positive value in the world today is beyond me.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Why would you register a domain name through VeriSign anyways???
Use register.com's Name Bargain!!
BTW: Anyone know of a RELIABLE place that is cheaper than this??
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
Verisign Horror Stories
The Verisign Sucks Page.
1. Volume registrants. Joe Schmoe might register one domain, once a year, but some high volume registrants will register 5000 domains a year. You give them a volume discount, but at this level of domain purchases it really is feasible to balance customer support costs with the meager income a domain registration provides.
2. Hosting. This is typically very profitable (at least compared to registrations). If a customer on the phone or at the website is interested in purchasing a domain they're probably also looking for hosting. Presenting a complete web package from design to registration to hosting makes it easy for a consumer to do it all in just one stop.
Versign (network solutions) is screwed. Sure it was a cash cow at first when they had a monopoly, but now they have a broken business model.
You can't pgpmail your changes to them anymore, as far as I know. It's all done via SSL web pages using an id/password they give you. This kicked in over the past several months. I must have like 20 different id/passwords now, although they do have a form for allowing you to consolidate accounts.
There is still a separate procedure for transfering ownership, although I have no idea why you can't now transfer ownership yourself by changing the org name, address, and admin/billing/tech contact handles yourself. Technically they want the new owner to enter a legal agreement with them (and charge big bucks to do an express transfer of course...)
I own three domain names, one of them under VeriSign/Network Solutions. Recently I had to make changes to the records for my domain names. It was a hassle.
How long has this company been at domain name handling? While they finally have a completely web based interface for the majority of functions related to domain names, you still have to use the eMail to hostmaster@networksolutions.com to change hosts records -- that is, your domain name's domain name servers. This shows blatant incompetency in regards to automation and their engineering staff.
How hard is it to make a little web form that is attached to a database? It's not.
Password, what password? I had been using the old crypt-password scheme for modifications to my domain names though the old eMail change method. When I went to use their website, I found that my account required a password. What password? It was not my old password, and they never asked me to modify my account. So I had to call up and get a password assigned to my domain name account.
And how long did it take for changed to propagate? For everything other than the hosts records, 24 hours or less. For the hosts modifications, it took over four days, and intervention by engineers because their system apparently was dropping the request for change. That would be four days of downtime for a website. Holy crap.
Trouble ticketing system for issues? They don't really have one as far as I can tell. I had to harass the support phone-droid to give me something to track the issue by, and she gave me some tracking number that they use in their database, but she seemed to indicate that they did not have any kind of trouble ticketing system.
If you are in business, you can't afford to do business with VeriSign/Network Solutions.
And I just noticed that Verisign doesn't show the billing party on the whois screen anymore.