850K RegisterFly Domains Moved To GoDaddy

miller60 writes "The long-suffering customers of RegisterFly should soon be able to manage their names again after ICANN arranged for the transfer of its 850,000 domains to GoDaddy.com. ICANN terminated RegisterFly's accreditation back in March but it took a court order to pry the domains loose so they could be transferred to another registrar. For those just joining the story (see earlier discussions on Slashdot), RegisterFly is the New Jersey domain registrar that collapsed amid management chaos in February, leaving most customers unable to manage, renew, or transfer their domains. ICANN, which was widely criticized for its inability to do more for RegisterFly customers, expressed relief at the saga's apparent conclusion."

Comments

If My Experience is Any Indication....

[queenb**ch]

GoDaddy.com might not be a big improvement. I know that I've not been impressed with them at all. I don't care HOW cheap their hosting gets, I'll certainly never host anything with them again. The hosting company I normally use is about $7 a month. I get a live English speaking CLUE-FUL human no matter what time I call tech support and I seldom have to call. By comparison, GoDaddy is about $3 a month and I've spent more time on the phone with GoDaddy than I do with my mother. Our connections to our database keep failing, an issue which GoDaddy is either unwilling or unable to correct. When your entire web site is a dynamic, database driven site that effectively puts us off the air. Spending hours with an outage that my friends in Atlanta, GA; Washington, DC; Portald, OR; Hamburg, Germany; Calcutta, India; Hong Kong; Tiawan; and Nairobi, Kenya can all see but technical support staff at GoDaddy can't seem to spot is flatly unacceptable. Then they have the nerve to tell me that it's my ISP and they can't help me. I've certainly learned my lesson and for less than the cost of a latte every month I can have peace of mind and web site that works.

2 cents,

Queen B.

Re:If My Experience is Any Indication....

[wfberg]

Businesses should not be run on shared hosting accounts. Every time there's a hardware problem on a Dreamhost shared box/cluster, for example, there's a whole pile of morons complaining that their business is losing money, etc etc.

Dedicated hosting or colocation, people. Pay for an SLA!

I've seen this bandied about on dreamhost's forums before. But face it, $7/month for hosting isn't cheap. I could run my puny little website off my home PC and ADSL line with no problem, so any money at all that's spent on hosting outside the door is spent there for a reason: economies of scale. That $7 times thousands of customers should be able to buy some redundant power supplies, for example. Dreamhost's particular problem is that while they do a whole lot of things right, the building they're located in does not have a dependable or redundant powersupply. It's not the $7/month pricing that's making their sites unreliable, it's their own past decisions.

If anything, shared hosting should be more reliable than a dedicated server. You're not fucking up things yourself as root. There'll be measures in place to prevent sites from using up all the bandwidth. Some one's keeping an eye out on the server 24h, or at least 38 pimply teenagers will complain about their forum being down the second anything happens to it..

Let's put it this way; buying dedicated hosting at the likes of dreamhost won't help you the next time the power for their entire facility goes down. Or when the (single, non-redundant) connection to their secondary datacenter, which actually happens to host dedicated servers, goes down.

Progress, sort of

[Animats]

What this is really about was finding some registrar willing to take on the customer support load of cleaning up the mess. ICANN doesn't have a call center.

There are some interesting implications to this deal. For one thing, domain owners whose domains are now administered by GoDaddy have no contractual obligations to GoDaddy. So they should be able to transfer those domains anywhere, immediately.

Meanwhile, RegisterFly still hasn't complied with the court order issued Friday to put a notice on their web site within 48 hours that they are no longer a domain egistrar. They're even still taking registrations. I just tried their domain registration page, and it works at least up to the "checkout" point. So RegisterFly is probably in contempt of court.

Re:Why godaddy?

[iminplaya]

A win-win-win deal, more or less.

Maybe for GoDaddy and Registerfly. Certainly not for the customers

Re:Why godaddy?

[Southpaw018]

Er...first, my experiences with their support have all been good, and as far as they go I'm definitely a small fish. Second, why do you even need tech support to transfer? Log in to your account, go to the domain control panel, and transfer it. The link's right there. Last time I transferred a domain from GoDaddy to another registrar, the initiation was done in under 5 minutes. Then there's the few day wait time for the transfer, and that's it.

Re:Out of the pan and into the Fire !!

[gfilion]

Aside 2: And if Cuba is so bad that US has a trade embargo against it, why not have a similar one against China? Oh, wait, it's about the money stupid! Actually, the US has put an embargo against Cuba since Fido Castro threw the US business out of the country without compensation -- effectively stealing their properties. The whole story is more complex than that, you can read it on Wikipedia.