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Some Hope During Registerfly's Meltdown
hookmeister writes "If you registered your domain at Registerfly.com, then you should know it may be locked, and you are at the moment unable to access it through Registerfly's website (video). You may even be unable to renew your domain because it has expired into a status known as 'redemption' through no fault of your own. By all accounts there are just under 2 million domains at risk here. Enom dumped them as a reseller; their SSL cert has expired; it's a mess. Fortunately the principals in this are trying to restore order. The external website registerflies.com, originally crafted as a gripe-zone and forum for Registerfly users, has gotten inside the ranks of the post-shakup Registerfly management, made some friends and connections, and is creating a back-door problem-reporting form that goes directly to those who can correct a domain problem. The official Registerfly support ticketing system remains clogged with thousands of unanswered complaints."
After the GoDaddy debacle, I tried to transfer my domains to Domainsite.com but they appear to be drunk at the moment (they cancelled my transfers and then sent me a notice that my refund failed - I've been calling and emailing for weeks now with no response).
What is a reasonable registrar, these days?
From what I heard Kevin Medina was fired (one of the partners) of Register Fly. Obviously, disgruntled about bieng forced out, decided to mess with the backend systems of registerfly. Thus thier own support department wasn't able to access thier systems to correct any issues, etc...
I've seen this coming for a long time. I chronicled my trials and tribulations of trying to get my domain names back on my blog, which some people may find interesting:
e rfly-scam/
http://fallingbullets.com/blog/2006/dec/10/regist
Thankfully, I managed to get all my domains back.
It's time for ICANN to invoke paragraph 3.2.3 of the Registrar Agreement. The Registrar then has ten days to provide a data dump of all their registrations, allowing bulk transfer of a failing registrar's data to another registrar.
There are a lot of phishy goings on in the registrar business. I'm not a squatter myself so I don't transfer domains in and out of registrars on a daily basis. I just have one domain. ItsYourDomain is where I'm at now. Haven't been screwed yet. Slightly more expensive than GoDaddy, but it seems to be run by real people. I'm sure there are some other good, maybe even better ones. Sort of like I'm not convinced bash is the best shell, but its good enough that Its not worth my time to research anything else. Unless some one were to reply to my post...
I hope this post was a joke, but if it wasn't everyone who is currently with Network Solutions should know what kind of company it is. You can read all about it on various sites, or you can read my personal horror story with NetSol. NetSol stinks.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
Can enom, and therefore enom resellers, be trusted? Did enom do anything incompetent or abusive? You seem to imply they did.
See this recent Slashdot story with recommended domain name registrars.
I remember getting burned a few years ago by a hosting company. I had every reason to believe from their website that they were a good sized outfit that was a subsidiary to one of the local phone companies in Florida. All the photos of their "datacenter" were so convincing, and in fact for a couple of years the services was quite OK. But then screwy things started happening that should have shouted out to me: "This company is operating on a shoestring budget in some kids parent's basement!".
Actually it turned out to be a small warehouse office space with a few servers and high school drop-outs for staff. The tie-in with the phone company was total BS and some sleuthing revealed that the other family business was closer to being a fertilizer business (no really!) than anything else. I got off that system just in time. I lost some things, but not much, people who waited a bit longer lost everything including access to their domains etc.
When I looked for a replacement I was much more careful to look for telltale signs that it was the same kind of, for lack of a better term "soft-fraud" operation. I think I got pretty good at it, but what scared me was the percentage of fairly well known companies that were using the same boilerplate text and generic graphics of their facilities. One thing I especially looked for was if no actual peoples names appeared on the web site. Big companies have "Chairmen" and "CEOs" who love to get their pictures on the corporate web site. These fly-by-night outfits on the other hand just have support contact numbers that go to an answering machine and not indication that anyone associated with the company wants their actual name to show up anywhere. You have to wonder why. Or maybe you don't.
I'm almost positive that Registerfly (and I think they had a hosting come-on too) was one of these fairly obvious scam operations. I'm SOOOO glad I stayed away.
My hope is that in the not too distant future Google and some other big names will get into the free-to-low-cost hosting and registration business and put these low-life vermin out of our misery.