I first want to apologize for the jumpyness of the post. I decided to just type and see what comes out. So here it is…
I also want you to know up front the best Domain and Webhosting company I use now is 1and1.com.
Now for my rambling post…
I have been registering domain names for a long time now. I first started with Register.com. I have used registerfly.com, cheapdomains.com, and 1and1.com. My favorite by far now is 1and1.com. Great price, great services and nice overall.
I registered a domain for my Dad’s college football business with register.com. The price was huge and I didn’t like paying so much for the name. Back then register.com didn’t provide hosting either. So, I had to also buy hosting for the site. When the name came up for renewal I was short on cash at that time and started searching for a cheaper register. I found one: registerfly.com. I transferred my domain and was so excited I had found a diamond in the rough. I did, I talked with the owners at the time on the phone, via the web, and email. Great support and they always helped me quickly with any issues I had. I became a reseller for registerfly.com and sold some domain name to others and made some money that was as well. At some point I stopped my affiliate advertising with registerfly.com; not because I was dissatisfied with them, but because I was reading bad reviews of them on many forums. Because of the bad reviews; it became more difficult to sell with the bad reviews. I had never had an issue like the people on the forums had been talking about. I thought these people were just inpatient. I now had over 25 domains registered with them. I wasn’t ever concerned about my domain names in the least. I received an email from registerfly.com announcing they had become ICANN approved. I thought to myself, “I’m right. ICANN wouldn’t approve them if they really did have these issues.” Something fell apart within the past 6 months or so.
Then I was hit. I had one website registered for my family and we used it as our families email domain. The domain was about to expire and I was out of town and did not receive the email notifying me and reminding me the domain was needing renewal. Well, I have missed renewing a domain name before, [I think many of us with a lot of domains have done the same thing] but the domain is normally placed in a 30 day holding. I logged into my account and went to find the authorization code to transfer the domain to my 1and1.com account. There was no authorization code for the domain. So I tried to renew my domain name the day it was to expire. The domain did not renew. In the past I called registerfly.com and told them I wanted to renew the domain name and they quickly renewed the domain without a problem at all. Not this time. I couldn’t get through by phone to registerfly.com and they no longer had the 24hr webchat for support either. So, I had to create a support ticket to let them know what had happened. They replied to my ticket with information about what had happened, but they didn’t tell me they were going to renew my domain name. To this day, it still isn’t renewed and they still took my money and I haven’t been refunded the money. It’s been over 30 days, so the domain name may now be gone.
With in the last 30 days, I started receiving some emails from enom.com telling me about domain names that I had registered with registerfly.com and telling me registerfly.com was a reseller for them. enom.com also told me they had terminated their relationship with registerfly.com because they did not provide the standard of service enom.com required of their affiliates. enom.com provided a way for me to transfer some domains to them because they were registered through the affiliation with registerfly.com. I did transfer some to enom.com, but I did not want to move many to them because they had a huge price (in my opinion) for registration and renewals.
I stopped registering domain names through registerfly.com about six months ago and have been registering all new domains through 1and1.com. I have also been transferring domains to 1and1.com from registerfly.com as they came time to renew. I have two domain names that I started to use for my overall website business. davelhansen.com and replytodavelhansen.com. The first was mainly for processing payments with paypal and the second became my helpdesk. Well, these two domains needed to be renewed and I went to transfer them to my 1and1.com account, but I ran into the same problem I had with my family related website.
So, some of you may have been trying to reach me via my helpdesk located at replytodavelhansen.com/helpdesk with out success. This is due to the problem with registerfly.com. They have taking my money for three domain names now and I am not able to use those domain names now because registerfly.com has not renewed them.
Today, I went to find out if they had updated the support tickets I had opened up on all of these domain names and I the domain didn’t even come up. So, now all of my domain names registered through registerfly.com are in lymbo. I don’t know when they are going to be back if ever. I also found a site dedicated to issues with registerfly.com called http://www.registerflies.com/. The site tells me ICANN has issued a letter to registerfly.com about issues. Legal action is being taking against registerfly.com via ICANN. There was also an issue with one of the owners.
ICANN is going to try and protect all domains from being deleted during this time of transition. They are also trying to find a solution to help customers like myself transfer our domains at some point, but for now that may not be possible.
