Slashdot Mirror
Registerfly's Accreditation Terminated by ICANN
Punker22 writes "Effective immediately ICANN has terminated RegisterFly.com's accreditation. Between now and 31 March RegisterFly is required to unlock and provide all necessary Authinfo codes to allow domain name transfers to occur. Any and all registrants wishing to transfer away from RegisterFly during this period should be allowed to do so efficiently and expeditiously. 'Terminating accreditation is the strongest measure ICANN is able to take against RegisterFly under its powers,' Dr. Paul Twomey, President and CEO of ICANN said today."
I've been trying to transfer my fiancee's small business domain from them over to DynDNS for about a month with no success. I tried initiating the transfer through GoDaddy's management tools (which seem to be really geared towards domain squatting, btw) and found nothing useful. It's a real rat's nest in there. Initiating the transfer from DynDNS got us nowhere. No transfer request notification is ever sent by GoDaddy, and everything silently fails a week or so later.
She's so frustrated with it that at this point, she'd rather wait for the domain to expire and just re-register with someone else. Understanding how easy it is for someone to snatch up a freshly expired domain, I'm thinking that's a bad idea.
Has anyone else had a similar problem (or success?) trying to transfer away from GoDaddy? We are running out of ideas.
Now, if they would only follow suit with Tucows.
I have a domain at with of their resellers which can not be contacted. (In fact their site certificate expired last October.) Unfortunately, Tucows offers absolutely no recourse, and the phone number listed in the whois will let you sit on hold forever, and eventually (after an hour or so) spit you into a voicemail box, which goes unanswered. Likewise, the email contact forms simply forward to the resellers. Very useful.
The reseller is domainsnare.net, which is also related to mailsnare.net. Not recommended...
Your dislike of GoDaddy for political reasons may be valid, but functionally, they aren't bad at all.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
From the first linked article above:
:-)
RegisterFly.com, which according to ICANN has its offices at 4th Floor, 404 Main Street, Boonton, NJ
With that address, what did people expect?
FWIW the Registerfly main page still displays the ICANN logo, and based on a little experimentation a short while ago it seems that I could still register a domain there if I was so foolish to want to give them my money.
They seem to be taking that letter very seriously.
A great tutorial on the problems
Short:
:(.
2 owners got into power struggle. One locked the other out, the other locked everyone out.
Effect:
1. you cannot renew domains,
2. Support cannot help (just promise)
3. You do not have auth codes to move your domains away
4. Finance system does not work
5. domains are changing data randomly -> dns settings
For me: my domains were to expire, so I deposited money. Renewal failed, money disappeared, domains expired.
I spent hours on the phone, they promised to renew manually. Now whois shows it is renewed, Regfly shows it is not. Info changed back to their nameservers and "expirefly".
So some of my domains I renewed and I paid for are making pay-per-click for them, losing ranking and customers, and I cannot even change the nameservers or transfer them, because they show up as "expired" in their system.
Just make a search for "registerfly" and you will see all kinds of horror stories.
I am looking at spending over $400 for unnecessary renewals, and who knows what in revenue. I am in the process of finding a good lawyer and see what I can do about this mess
I fear though, that for the time a lawsuit would go through they would declare bankruptcy and retract to their Miami Beach villas (yes one owner lives there).
See where you can find your EPP auth codes in the RegisterFly control panel
I had heard very good things about Namecheap for sometime so I transferred all my RegisterFly domains there this morning and everything went smoothly. For those interested in Namecheap, use coupon code "marchmadness" to get $7.99 transfers instead of $8.88. This coupon code isn't associated with me in anyway.
Well, duh. That's what happens when you make domain registration an open market. Registration is not a complicated product, so the only way vendors can compete is price. The natural result is a service like GoDaddy which charges a few bucks for a single registration, and provides a corresponding level of service. And why is it news that they facilitate domain squatting? They (and a lot of other registrars) have been advertising cheap bulk registrations for years. And why shouldn't they? If we say, "Compete any way you can", this is the natural result.
If it were up to me, we'd go back to one having one registrar that charges $35/year for every second-level domain. No, better yet, raise it to $100 a year. Allow the registrar a reasonable profit, and put the rest of the money into something useful: research, or bridging the digital divide.
Shazam! No more domain squatting. It's not longer profitable. And that single registrar has every incentive to provide good service: if they don't, they lose their cash cow.
"No way! Why should I have to pay that much for my personal domain name??!!" Hey, if a vanity web site is that important to you, you should shell out. If not, get a third-level domain. When a web site contains nothing but family photos and rants about gun control, nobody cares whether its on JoeBlow.com or JoeBlow.CheapISP.com.
But of course that's never going to happen: ICANN couldn't possibly stand up to all the whinning that would result. So we're stuck with the current situation, and there's no use complaining about companies like GoDaddy. So you're just going to have to live with domain squatting. And remember that when it comes to registering your domain, you get what you pay for.
I fear though, that for the time a lawsuit would go through they would declare bankruptcy and retract to their Miami Beach villas (yes one owner lives there).
People get confused about the protections of a corporation. It protects investors that aren't involved in the decisions. If the two owners caused the trouble, and it would be possible to prove in court (provided you subpoenaed the right documents), then sue the company and name the owners as co-defendants. You can't sue owners just because you think the company will go bankrupt. But you can sue the person at the company who made the decisions that harmed you (regardless of whether they are owners). That way, you can get judgements from the owners directly. If they have director/officer insurance (nearly all do) and you have a reasonable case, you will get quick cash. Insurance companies know that settling is cheaper than a court battle, no matter who wins. And if it does go to court, you'll get your losses, and your lawyer will have a nice new Miami Beach villa. If the company declares bankruptcy, as well as both owners and neither had appropriate liability insurance, then you'd be screwed, but I think the chances of that are relatively small, not to mention the changes in bankruptcy laws designed to screw the little guys would actually hit them (it's harder to get judgements wiped away via bankruptcy now).
Learn to love Alaska
ICANN had already invoked the "provide backup copy of registrar data" provision of the Registrar agreement, which requires that, on demand, any registrar provide ICANN with a backup copy of the registrar's data in a standard format. RegisterFly didn't comply.
That data isn't lost, though. There's a source of backup WHOIS data. Try DomainTools, which maintains copies of all WHOIS and DNS data. So if you need to prove domain ownership after RegisterFly shuts down, there's a way.
Two heads, who happened to be ex-lovers got into a fight. One (John) in conjunction with a board member fired the other (Kevin). This went to court just last week I believe. Kevin holds majority owner ship of the company and was awarded control once again.
Meanwhile ICANN was had issued several notices to correct these issues are lose accreditation. This week ICANN made good on its threat. A lot of people lost domains due to problems RegisterFly started having long before the news picked this up.
Mike Zupke from ICANN has stepped in and has been helping RegisterFly customers obtain authorization codes on locked accounts (with a good deal of luck). Likewise eNom, whom RegisterFly was originally a reseller, has been helping customers who were unaware of the shift (eNom terminated its agreement with RegisterFly effective I believe at that start of this month) retrieve domains RegisterFly had hold of (ProtectFly, RegisterFly's whois/privacy service made some of this more difficult).
Renewals for clients that were eNom registered (though the reseller program) probably didn't even realize RegisterFly wasn't in fact their registrar (RegisterFly communicated the eNom's whois through a backend API, so you could manage domains seemlessly without realizing it).
Auth code can be difficult to get, but no matter what now that ICANN finally has stepped in a little patience and you will get your domain.
The best single source for real information is RegisterFlies who apparently intend to stay on after the end of this debacle and become a source for information and help with other domain registry issues. They have a big help and there are a lot of people there going through the same thing.
Quack, quack.
You must have either a short memory or you missed out on all the fun. NamesDirect suffered a massive meltdown of its DNS servers a few years back, leaving hundreds of thousands of domains in the dark for a week or more. They did not have sufficient capacity or redundancy in their servers and did not communicate with their customers for days. Perhaps it's better now, but as soon as I could, I transferred my domains out of there and would never return.
The registrar I've had the best luck with is eNom, though I left them for Registerfly a coup[le of years back (mainly because of pricing.) 10 of my 11 domains are out of Registerfly now (to a mixture of eNom and 1&1.)
I do use Dreamhost for hosting most of my sites and they've been good to me.