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ICANN Moves Against GoDaddy Domain Lockdowns
An anonymous reader writes "ICANN is finally taking action against Domain Registrar GoDaddy's controversial 'lockdowns'. GoDaddy has long had a policy of 'locking down' domain names for 60 days after a customer updated their contact details. This put customers in a Catch 22 position: ICANN requires customers keep their contact details up to date, or risk having the domain forfeited. Yet during the lockdown period the customer is prevented from transferring the domain from GoDaddy to another registrar. If the lockdown ran over the domain's expiry date, customers were forced to renew with GoDaddy or lose the domain. ICANN proposes to ban this practice. ICANN who is charged with overseeing the Internet has long been accused of giving domain registrars a free ride. But recently after ICANN failed to discipline Network Solutions over a front-running scam, they found themselves both on the wrong end of a lawsuit by lawyers Kabateck Brown Kellner. Is ICANN's action a signal of increased vigilance in policing registrars, or is it a PR move paving the way for a complete removal of US Government oversight?"
I always use 1&1 Internet, which has excellent support and is extremely well priced. For hosting, Joyent is your friend.
Any fool can talk, but it takes a wise man to listen.
Hello
can anyone please point to a decent non "evil" registrar
Goddady = bad (see this article)
Enom = bad ( see http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/09/025222 )
Network solutions ( see http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/23/1914238 and http://slashdot.org/article.pl?no_d2=1&sid=00/05/12/2141250 and http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/15/2121200
Anyone?
I go with gandi.net, who are reasonably price, have decent service, and appear to be fairly white-hat.
If you speak (or at least understand some) danish, I will highly recommend http://gratisdns.dk/
It is free to move your domain to and use their DNS servers, and you get full control of the DNS records.
If you want to register a new domain, the prices are very fair.
Check out dreamhost.com. I use them for domain names and hosting - reasonable prices, great service (my bandwidth and disk space grows every week for free), and (if this matters to you) they're carbon neutral.
Network Solutions does this as well. I had to update my e-mail address in my contact information in order to transfer a domain to another registrar. NS locked the domain down for 60 days because of the update. The 60 days would have lasted beyond the expiration of the domain name, meaning I had to renew through NS or risk having someone (possibly NS!) buy it first and charge me more to get it back.
It took two or three encounters with their support staff and the threat of a complaint to ICANN to get the lock removed so I could continue with the transfer.
1&1 Internet took over a week & a half to register my (new) domain. Went to GoDaddy, registered it in 20ms after I clicked purchase. Thankfully 1&1 Internet gave a refund, an additional week later.
If you really want a cheap one, go for hosterio. It is based in India, and that is almost the cheapest you can get.
GoDaddy : Silly name that does not describe what they do, Commercials that hide they are a very dull company providing a very menial service
... but they just sell domain names
...
they talk about "product development" and similar
They do not run any Root Nameservers, they do not police the system, they are selling registrations, and nothing else
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
I just transfered a domain from godaddy yesterday. Since I had originally registered it with them, they had the auth code already, so I didn't need to do anything to get it.
Funny thing was, I had to check a box that said I agreed that the person I was transferring it to was obligated to accept the 60 day lockdown after the transfer.
ariven.com
Actually, IP address allocations are handled by ARIN (http://www.arin.net/) and other regional registries (like RIPE http://www.ripe.net/) and the NRO (http://www.nro.net/). If you consider them the Phone Company, then ICANN is simply the Yellow and White Pages.
I'm soured on 1&1 too. At work, we have one domain (our primary one) on Netsol, and the rest of the names on 1&1. Unfortunately, 1&1 bounced an email to us and put us in collections and never bothered to give us a phone call.
:)
We only found this out when we wanted to consolidate all our domains with 1&1. (Of course, I found that our 10-year old domain had the contact info from our old ISP!)
Because of the transfer screwup, we kept it status quo with one name on NS and the others on 1&1. It was such a hassle with 1&1 that I am thinking seriously about consolidation again, only to Netsol instead! (and that is saying much!)
I'd like to see reforms at ICANN, so I don't have to worry about being screwed when some registrar is bought out by someone or when some different set of suits is put in management.
P.S. Direcnic is not the cheapest, but I use them personally and I have no reason to switch. Besides, considering their location, they have disaster preparedness down pat.
Excellent support? They took 2 weeks to fix a domain name that their control panel borked when updating.
I was out a domain name for two weeks, and received no compensation.
Oh, and if you only do domain registration through them, you're limited to 5 subdomains per account, not per domain.
That means if you have 100 domain names, you can only have 5 glue domains.
insecure.org put up a nice list at nodaddy.com when their domain was yanked. It looks like it is still there.
http://nodaddy.com/#alternatives
I go with NearlyFreeSpeech.NET for domain registration and hosting. If it works for BugMeNot, it's good for me. Plus I host some rather...interesting...content, and they haven't had a problem with it yet.
ARIN, RIPE, etc, get their addresses allocated to them from IANA. IANA is run under ICANN (ye, gods, too many acronyms). Basically, they manage the IP addresses of the 'net in much the same way that they manage the DNS of the 'net: they're the high-level policy folks, but not the ones you get numbers or names from.
I've used Joker for a few years and have been happy with the service.
Careful there. That place has a pretty harsh policy for what their email servers accept. Granted, it's a good policy, but there is potential for legit mails being bounced (as with any anti-spam measures). Still, if I wanted mail forwarding, I'd use the service. After all, the owner is one of the original spam fighters (search for Jeff Wheelhouse), so I'd expect no less of his services. (For you internet young'uns not old enough to have used a real NNTP client for collaboration, this is a great historical worth reading. Plus, it outlines what fools lawyers can be.)