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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.
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.
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.
$7 a month *is* cheap. Come back after buying some real servers.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.