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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."
Well, this should allow us to finally answer the long-standing question: "Is GoDaddy better than a bunch of thieving incompetents?"
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I'm guessing probably because GoDaddy had the capacity to take them, and probably approached ICANN with a canned solution ready to go at a time when ICANN was running around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to figure out what to do. Now that customers have control over their domains again, they should be able to transfer them to whatever registrar they want.
"Why godaddy? Why could people not chose what register to transfer to?"
Because the more options people are provided, the more complex the solution becomes, making it harder to implement and harder to understand, which means it takes longer to go live and creates greater levels of confusion when it does.
This is a simple solution (hopefully) that clears things up as quickly as possible (hopefully), and when everything has settled down (hopefully), people will be able to transfer their domains from GoDaddy to wherever they want.
Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Because GoDaddy offered a wad of cash to Registerfly to buy their customers. (ICANN called it a "commercial transaction") Registerfly gets the cash they need to pay court fees, GoDaddy gets thousands of new customers (lots of revenue potential from renewals and add-ons), and registerfly customers get control of their domains back. A win-win-win deal, more or less.
I don't know what registerfly ran on, but given that godaddy seems to be on windows, it might be that a sizeable % of those 850k domains will be counted as "windows" in 1,2,3 ... therefore confirming imminent apache death.
It's not about whether you've personally had any problems. Frankly, it's a matter of principle, and since it only takes ten minutes of your time and less than $10 of your credit card to transfer, it's well worth it. Don't support companies that engage in these sorts of practices, because sooner or later your apathy will make you end up screwed.
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.
You want to give them a shout-out? I'm always looking for recommendations for solid hosting providers. (I used to recommend FatCow, and they really are nice guys there, but you have to pay a year in advance to get their $8.25/mo rate.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
How about you pay more then $3/month if you want reliable hosting, eh? You get what you pay for.
Where's my mod points when I need them...
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!
Imagine the sheer number of domains they have registered, if only a few get shut down here and there it's probably a negligible percentage.
Why are you so sure the problems are negligible? The story is quite revealing that GoDaddy has little to no respect for its customers when they take down an entire domain with almost non-existent effort to contact the owner (one attempt, then take down the site seconds later). Then they make it extremely difficult to get in contact with anyone to fix the situation.
To me that kind of behavior is extremely revealing. Personally I'd bet that this kind of treatment from GoDaddy is a lot more common than you'd think, and it just never gets reported until a higher profile site gets taken down.
AccountKiller
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.
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.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
$7 a month *is* cheap. Come back after buying some real servers.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
A win-win-win deal, more or less.
Maybe for GoDaddy and Registerfly. Certainly not for the customers
What?
Er, no. It is easy to transfer. And also they don't deal with commie countries like Cuba. I'd say GoDaddy is more of a company that lapdances for the US foreign policy. (see GoDaddy terms of service)
Aside: If GoDaddy.com wanted to help Cubans, they would want them to have as much access to the Internet as possible instead of filtering Cuban ips from resolving DNS for domains hosted at GoDaddy.
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!
GoDaddy is pure concentrated evil. They are known to park pages on domains whose names you've looked up. If the domain gets many hits, they keep it and you end up having to buy it at an increased rate. If it doesn't, it's later released back for sale.
Never use GoDaddy for ANYTHING. They are malicious, evil, greedy fuckers.
I currently use them as my registrar, but will be moving when I get around to moving my website from its current hosting (not godaddy.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
Currently, all RegisterFly domains are (supposed to have been) placed into serverDeleteProhibited status, which means the Central Registry (Verisign) is not able to actually expire them... they remain perpetually locked until they are changed back to pendingRelease, clientTransferProhibited, or some other status. In other words, they can't expire until the mass transfer.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Actually GoDaddy approached Registerfly alone, outside of ICANN.
The deal was made on the back end. Kevin Medina
had to know this was his best alternative because ICANN
was/is suing the pants off of him.
The day Microsoft creates a product that doesn't suck, it will be known as the Microsoft Vaccuum Cleaner!