Domain name hell

February 26, 2007 9:02 AM

Registerfly falls apart as ICANN watches As the registerfly fiasco continues, ICANN seems feckless and befuddled. Some people's anger seems to have spiraled out of control. Others take this opportunity to hone their movie making skills.
posted by a_day_late (52 comments total)

Speaking as someone that was once under the employ of a large registrar, this sounds like all-too-typical ICANN behavior.
posted by owenkun at 9:15 AM on February 26, 2007

Yet another reason why I'm really glad I kissed off the ".com" domain and went with NuNames.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 9:21 AM on February 26, 2007

Complete derail: a classic eggcorn in the last sentence of the first link: "For all intensive purposes." I never imagined that anyone really did that one; I assumed it was made up like most of the supposed misheard lyrics on kissthisguy.com.
posted by George_Spiggott at 9:37 AM on February 26, 2007 [1 favorite]

Wow, that ICANN ombudsman is a master at passing the buck.
posted by mediareport at 9:41 AM on February 26, 2007

George_Spiggott, heh, thanks for noting that. I missed it, but I couldn't miss than the article as a whole was poorly written.
posted by bhouston at 9:46 AM on February 26, 2007

They sound pretty bad, but that guy's video actually makes me want to try them out. $.60 for a domain name! And he doesn't seem to be that....with-it...himself, so maybe the problem is on his end (I keep thinking to myself).
posted by DU at 9:46 AM on February 26, 2007

ICANN sucks, they were origionally going to be a 'democracy' but when some skeptics actually got elected they changed everything around saying "Well, it's not our job to manage a worldwide democracy!"

That said, it does seem like it would be difficult. How would it work? one vote per domain name? If so, registrars could buy huge blocks of domains just to get extra votes. One vote per registrant? How do you determine unique registrants? Hackers could register domains under fake names all over the world in order to get extra votes.
posted by delmoi at 9:49 AM on February 26, 2007

The only problem is their domain names are locked up, and their authorization codes are being withheld preventing transfers to alternative registrars. Domain names reaching their expiry date are simply being lost.

What the hell? What is ICANN sitting on their ass for?
posted by rolypolyman at 9:53 AM on February 26, 2007

DU, I'd stay away at any price. A domain is of no use if you can't access your account to change the DNS, etc. Add to that that registerfly has been caught stealing domains by changing the whois to people who work there and you can see that it's not much of a bargain at any price.
posted by a_day_late at 9:54 AM on February 26, 2007

Oh totally.

But $.60! That would save me literally *pennies* per year on my two domains!

It's like the WalMart of domain names, in more ways than one.
posted by DU at 9:56 AM on February 26, 2007

What the hell? What is ICANN sitting on their ass for?

Yeah, I don't get it. Seems they could stop the bleeding, at least.
posted by mediareport at 10:06 AM on February 26, 2007

Apparently they're the cheapest registrar, and you get what you pay for.
posted by clevershark at 10:07 AM on February 26, 2007

DU writes "They sound pretty bad, but that guy's video actually makes me want to try them out. $.60 for a domain name! And he doesn't seem to be that....with-it...himself, so maybe the problem is on his end (I keep thinking to myself)."

When the ship's sinking most people's reaction would be to abandon ship, not board it!
posted by clevershark at 10:09 AM on February 26, 2007

ICANN needs Canadianising, a little POGG would do wonders for the process.
posted by Mitheral at 10:13 AM on February 26, 2007

While I have learned to loathe Bob Parson's ego and his awful, awful Hooter-esque campaign for promoting their product, stories like this are why I have not changed registrars.
posted by cavalier at 10:21 AM on February 26, 2007

where does the mefi populace register their domains? i use pairnic.com. $19 a year is a lot more than .60, but you really do get what you pay for.
posted by localhuman at 10:28 AM on February 26, 2007

When the ship's sinking most people's reaction would be to abandon ship, not board it!

Sure, but depending on your purposes you might just look around and say, "golly! Floor's a bit wet, but the rent! The rent!"
posted by cortex at 10:30 AM on February 26, 2007

And I'm a joker.com man, myself. Reasonably cheap, not Godaddy, and I haven't had problems. Plus, they're German, and everything is in charming ESL English.
posted by cortex at 10:31 AM on February 26, 2007

"For all intensive purposes." I never imagined that anyone really did that one; I assumed it was made up like most of the supposed misheard lyrics on kissthisguy.com.

people do that all the time. my all time favorite is "low self of steam".
posted by quonsar at 10:33 AM on February 26, 2007

Apparently they're the cheapest registrar, and you get what you pay for.

Not really. Their prices have been on the low end but not dirt cheap like you see now. Their current prices reflect the panic of losing all their customers.
posted by a_day_late at 10:33 AM on February 26, 2007

where does the mefi populace register their domains? i use pairnic.com. $19 a year is a lot more than .60, but you really do get what you pay for.

Godaddy is run by a war crimes sympathizer. I have a few domains with Namecheap. 8.88 a year. I've had no problems over the last two years.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:36 AM on February 26, 2007

i have a lot of domains with dotster. never a lick of toruble.
posted by quonsar at 10:39 AM on February 26, 2007

Apparently they're the cheapest registrar, and you get what you pay for.

Not particularly. Their $10/yr is beat by GoDaddy, among others. I'd been with Registerfly for 5 years or so and had no problems, as long as they were reselling ENOM. Not so much any more.

I'm in the process of moving a bunch of domains away from them right now. Only one is giving me problems, with "cientTransferProhibited" and "clientUpdateProhibited" listed as the status. Fortunately, it's for an inactive domain.
posted by SteveInMaine at 10:43 AM on February 26, 2007

I use pairNIC as well. If you buy five years in advance it works out to about $10/year, which ain't too shabby.
posted by Ljubljana at 10:46 AM on February 26, 2007

The "out of control" is awesome, and that person also offers a cure for Morgellons disease, the subject of one of my favorite ever MeFi posts. Good times!
posted by infinitywaltz at 11:21 AM on February 26, 2007

The "out of control" LINK, even. Damn it.
posted by infinitywaltz at 11:21 AM on February 26, 2007

Joker.com is quite good; their web interface is a little primitive, but they have superb infrastructure. I like them a lot.

At the moment, I'm personally using Namecheap; they have an extra service (for extra money) I like, called 'WhoisGuard'. This protects your name, email address, and physical address from prying eyes, but still allows people to get ahold of you if there's a problem with the domain. Privileged entities like law enforcement can still easily get the info, but the routine spammer-on-the-street can't.

Namecheap is less expensive than Joker and has a much nicer web interface, but I don't think their infrastructure is nearly as high end. I've seen occasional problems with their web redirects, as an example, and I've never seen Joker fail ever. (I think Namecheap might just be an eNom reseller, which would account for the lower-end hardware.)

Basically: if you HAVE to trust it, Joker is superb. If you can take a little less reliability in the ancillary services, Namecheap offers more of them, has a much better website, and is a little less expensive.
posted by Malor at 11:33 AM on February 26, 2007

That fFirst Youtube link: "I was on the phone [...] to find out why my domain wasn't registered and it's because one of those stupid spics decided not to register it. [...] The people are dirty rotten spics who take your money and don't give you sites. [...] You know what? Fuck you Registerfly and fuck your stupid spic workers [...]"

Whoa. Whoa.

I'm a Namecheap man myself. Great service. Not GoDaddy. What's not to like?
posted by rafter at 11:43 AM on February 26, 2007

As for registrars, personally, I am pretty impressed with eNom. They saved my domains during the registerfly meltdown and they did not seek to profit from it in any way (even though they are in the perfect position to do so). Their tech support (phone) is great. They are in Seattle and speak "real" English. Their web trouble ticket response is slow but I imagine that there is a lot of turmoil there right now due to this registerfly mess. Some people are flinging all kinds at accusations at everybody but I see no reason to hold eNom accountable and if it were not for them, a lot more people would have suffered because of this mess.
posted by a_day_late at 11:58 AM on February 26, 2007

I've registered everything with Dotster. Never had any problems at all.
posted by drstein at 12:21 PM on February 26, 2007

(ack, hit post too soon)
No problems ith Dotster, but I have had several hosting customers with other 'smaller' registrars that have had issues moving things over.

One problem is that many registrars are now trying to shuffle you into *their* web hosting packages as well.
posted by drstein at 12:22 PM on February 26, 2007

I've used Namecheap and dyndns (for domains) without any problems. I would not recommend any ItsYourDomain resellers because they often require paperwork to transfer domains.
posted by aye at 12:24 PM on February 26, 2007

I am one of the unlucky many who has a domain (only one, but it's very important to me) with Registerfly, and while some people have been able to transfers their out, I have not been so fortunate. The sad thing is that when I first used Registerfly back in 2003, they were really good; I had the occasional problem, but customer service always sorted things out quickly. It's a shame to see how bad it's gotten so quickly.
posted by Nedroid at 12:45 PM on February 26, 2007

Namecheap fan here.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 12:46 PM on February 26, 2007

I'm a pairnic man myself; I've been with pair since they started, and pairnic since they started. Have had pretty good dealings with them over the past decade.
posted by maxwelton at 12:52 PM on February 26, 2007

joker.com - they've made some improvements to the website in the last year or so. I spent a small chunk of time changing DNS settings yesterday - it's quick and pretty much painless to change DNS at joker. I also have one domain at godaddy and it took longer to get the DNS settings changed there for the one domain than it took to change the DNS settings for eight domains at joker.
posted by fluffy battle kitten at 12:58 PM on February 26, 2007

i gave some money to charity once and the charity rep called me a "philanderist".
posted by bruce at 12:58 PM on February 26, 2007

Wow that's an incredibly messed up situation. ICAAN is useless if they just let shit like this go on and on.

My family has had 9 domains with dotster for the last 7 years or so and we've never had any probs with them (before that we used netsol, which was a full on nightmare). At $14.95 a year dotster's a bit more expensive that some but so far they've been worth it.

Good luck Nedroid, I hope things work out & you retain your domain!
posted by zarah at 1:09 PM on February 26, 2007

Another vote for Dotster -- never had a problem with the few domains that I have with them. Not a big fan of their admin interface, but I've learned to live with it over the years.

GoDaddy scares me.
posted by Oops at 1:43 PM on February 26, 2007

where does the mefi populace register their domains? i use pairnic.com. $19 a year is a lot more than .60

No reason to pay that much. 19 bucks is considerably more than the going rate. It makes a difference when you own a lot of domains.

GoDaddy scares me.
posted by Oops

Well, that says a whole lot of nothing.

I've used just about every company there is and settled with godaddy, mainly because I'm use to them and they're cheap without being questionably cheap (and couldn't give a damn about their politics). The interface is terrible but I might have to use it 4 times a year. Not a big deal. I used registerfly years ago and they always seemed sketchy to me. Glad I moved away.

I've used godaddy mostly, but their interface sucks and they just spam their customers to death endlessly, so I'm thinking about switching to one of the other registrars people are recommending in this thread.
posted by luriete

I've used them for years and not received a single piece of spam, only emails when I make changes. You're doing something wrong, probably not opting out of 'specials' (which just about every online business offers nowadays).
posted by justgary at 2:17 PM on February 26, 2007

It's worth bearing in mind that $6.25 of your annual registration fee is a fixed cost: $6.00 goes to Verislime and .25 to ICANN't. That being the case and considering overeheads, any domain registration that costs less than 9 or 10 bucks is at best breakeven for the registrar, put out there to entice you into buying their value-add and other services like hosting. If you don't, you're not putting money in their pockets anyway.
posted by George_Spiggott at 2:31 PM on February 26, 2007

I can state with clear knowledge and forethought that anyone who spends any money whatsoever on registerfly or enom will be ripped off.

I've been working with two of my clients as they pursue legal remedies against registerfly, Medina, and enom, and we're not getting anywhere. Our current options are limited to abandoning the domains and websites they're associated with, and creating all new domains and sites elsewhere.

These people are unethical fucks - all of them - and deserve jail time.
posted by disclaimer at 3:46 PM on February 26, 2007

Yeah I have to warn against eNom as well; I was with them for a long time, and somehow, their management interface and payment system got worse and worse over time, to the point of being unusuable - every link you tried to click just turned into some extra service they were trying to sell me, so I gave up.

At the moment, I just host and get my domain through nearlyfreespeech.net - I don't know who handles nearlyfreespeech.net's domain registration for them, but so far they've been simple, cheap, and I've had no problems.
posted by Jimbob at 3:55 PM on February 26, 2007

I like 1and1, except for their support. If you don't anticipate needing help, they are cheap and never seem to have technical problems.

The only other negative is that you have to fax them a signed form to transfer or cancel anything, but that could be a positive thing depending on how you look at it.
posted by mazatec at 6:15 PM on February 26, 2007

Upon glancing up, nearlyfreespeech.net is awesome and deserves support. I wouldn't use their hosting for a high traffic site, but it would be great for personal sites. The people who run it seem to be genuinely nice.
posted by mazatec at 6:18 PM on February 26, 2007

Dotster. No problems.
posted by flabdablet at 6:48 PM on February 26, 2007

Upon glancing up, nearlyfreespeech.net is awesome and deserves support.

I was just reading the FAQ. I am old and not wise in the ways of the Internet. That whole site is blowing my mind. I intend to find out more.
posted by a_day_late at 7:03 PM on February 26, 2007 [1 favorite]

I've never had trouble with Namecheap, but then I've only got a few domains that I have to work with.

I must mention that I too have gotten spammed by GoDaddy. I never gave them my address, because I'd never do business with any company with which Bob "Close Gitmo? No Way" Parsons is associated. So yeah, it was spam. But it only lasted a couple of weeks and then suddenly stopped, so I'm not willing to go so far to say that they are serial spammers. Caveat emptor.
posted by moonbiter at 10:14 PM on February 26, 2007

i have a lot of domains with dotster.

I used dotster for years, and had no problems. I recently switched away from them to my hosting company (just to make my life easier admin-wise), and the transfer was painless. I recommend them as well.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 1:55 AM on February 27, 2007

I use Joker.com for one domain, and dotster for the other--never had the slightest problem with either. Joker always frightens me--the poor English really reads as "unprofessional", so I was quite glad to hear that they are well-respected here.
posted by Squid Voltaire at 1:11 PM on February 27, 2007

For those interested, Registerfly's accreditation has been terminated by ICANN.
posted by disclaimer at 4:52 PM on March 19, 2007

I use gandi. For my single, barely-used domain name, they've worked out wonderfully. And they're French.
posted by box at 5:06 PM on March 19, 2007