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."

Comments

Registerfly?

[zaydana]

Excuse my ignorance, but what actually happened in the first place? I'm kinda confused as to what has happened to registerfly? I'm presuming its a registrar, but that doesn't actually tell me all that much...

Re:Registerfly?

[EvanED]

Well, judging by the headline, its coolant failed and it went all Chernobyl.

Re:Registerfly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Registerfly used to be an eNom reseller, but recently became an independent registrar. In the process they left a large number of accounts as orphans with eNom. Those account holders, who I happen to be one of, received notices from both eNom and Registerfly several days after the accounts had been orphaned. Both companies were kind enough to offer to transfer the domain for a fee. Seems like it should be free since they decided to split their business not me. I may have to split after this treatment.

Re:Registerfly?

[hookmeister]

Yes Registerfly is Domain name regisration company. like Network Solutions, and GoDaddy.com ... when the post was written, registerfly's site was still up , so i assumed it would be self eveident to anyone not already aware but curious about it. -- Now www.regsiterfly.com is down because the 2 guys from inside the company that can fix it, are fixing it, right at the datacenter. ( they had to lock out one of the partners first, that guy was the one causing all the trouble) its a long story.

best read for the moment can be found here http://registerflies.com/welcome-to-the-registerfl y-gripe-site-6.html

A lot of people have been burned by the circumstances leading up to this.

Re:Registerfly?

[cmacb]

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.

I was one of those people

[Anonymous Coward]

Enom sent out a rather vague email that sounded a bit like spam when I first read it. They told me how I needed to transfer my domain... blah blah blah. Then a day or so later, I received a notice from registerfly that this previous email spoke truth. Registerfly also wants me to spend money on domains that I have already "paid up" on so to speak. I'm not making a move on this until I see what is coming of it. I may go to someone else entirely. I just keep wondering - why did they make a change effective Feb. 1, 2007, yet take until Feb. 6, 2007 to notify me of something they had been planning for a year or longer?

Explanation:-

[gigne]

In case anyone has no idea what this is all about, I summarised the points:

* Joint Director Kevin Medina was removed from the company for embezzlement of funds due to Registerfly's inability to pay it's upsream registrars.

source http://registerflies.com/docman/cat_view.html

complaints Filed in new Jersey:- Claims
1) Wiring 3x $9000 to personal accounts
2) $10000 to pay rent on apartment on a monthly basis
3) Paying large personal credit card bills
4) $6000 for liposuction
5) tens of thousands on "personal spending"

* they terminated Kevin Medina
http://registerflies.com/docman/doc_download-5.htm l

* Kevin Medina caused other untold system problems *not verified from any source, just speculation on registerflies

* Registerfly seem to be concentrating on fixing this.

Pretty confusing though.

Re:Any recommended registrars out there?

[daeg]

Read: http://nodaddy.com/

In short: Some guy was hosting automated archives of mailing lists. Someone sent a list of MySpace usernames and passwords through the list, which were automatically archived. MySpace threw a hissy fit. Instead of filing any legal paperwork, or even bothering to contact the owner, they went straight to GoDaddy and said "This site is hosting illegal content. Pull it down." GoDaddy complied, no questions asked. GoDaddy didn't contact the owner, either.

Note: the site wasn't even hosted with GoDaddy. GoDaddy was merely the registrar.

Demand that ICANN invoke para. 3.2.3

[Animats]

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.

Re:Well

[Apple Acolyte]

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.