Bad things are happening.  Can’t get to their site right now and all signs point to the possibility that they won’t be back at all.

I have seven domains on there and I want to transfer six of them…one of them expires in about 20 days.

If anyone has domains registered with them keep trying their site so you can get your domains transferred.

Post in here if you have an tips or pointers for rescuing domains from their clutches.

Supposedly ICANN is going to do what they can to preserve domain names for folks who registered with them.  Guess we will see soon enough.

B

About 6 or 8 months ago, I tried to switch from GoDaddy to RegisterFly.  I was having trouble with SSL on the GoDaddy site ... pages taking very long to load, timing out ... and then there was that incident where GoDaddy took down a legitimate site because someone accused them of something. I forget the details.

Anyway, I could NOT get RegisterFly to accept my credit card.  So I gave up on ‘em.  Turns out it was very fortunate, for me at least.

Incidentally, I found that the problem with GoDaddy was fixed by lowering my MTU from 1500 to 1400.  Apparently my local ISP and its DSL service do some NATing tricks that caused GoDaddy and some other sites to puke on the fragmented packets.

Back to your problem, you HAVE checked registerflies.com, haven’t you?

Does moral support count, at least?

Yeah I looked at some of that stuff I guess.  I’m not too worried about it.  It seems ICANN is doing what they can to preserve the data and get it shifted to other registrars.  They filed suit against them today according to their site (http://icann.org/announcements/announcement-02mar07.htm).

I KNOW I can count on other Igniters for moral support!   Thanks!

Yes…very fortunate for you they couldn’t accept your payment.

So who should I go to as a registrar now?  I actually switched from godaddy to registerfly myself because of my personal issues with their advertising.  I’m thinking of switching back because their service is pretty good and I can’t find anyone better/cheaper.  Any suggestions?

Yeah, I’ve looked at a number of others.  What I found was that every registrar that was inexpensive and had a good reputation, was also quite small, and might have been reselling domains from one of the larger ones (which was the case with at least some of RegisterFly’s domains).

Of the inexpensive large registrars, for every person I found saying they were so much better than GoDaddy, there was someone with a nightmare story dealing with them.

There were even people who swore by Network Solutions, so I took all those recommendations with a grain of salt. 

In truth, once I got my SSL issues worked out, I haven’t had any problems with GoDaddy.  I’ve learned how to navigate through their website with a minimum of additional sales pitches, I can change DNS stuff easily, and it does everything I need it to do.  Like you, I object to some of their philosophies, including switching to MS servers ... I can’t believe that was for performance but as a sweetheart deal with MS ... but I haven’t found a good guy registrar that I trusted to stay in business.

I got all but one domain out of there some months ago. It was stuck in the wonderful “renewal” process they have, which takes weeks and involves duplicate charges to your cc. Was not aware of the latest happenings. Better move that last domain now it seems. You can find your auth code for transfers at the bottom of one of the screens in your Registerfly account. That’s how I got out. I also wrote down all the auth codes for all domains right away, since Registerfly never appeared super stable to me. I moved on to Dynadot. Not fancy looking, but they seem to know what they are doing and I have not had to deal with them in support, i.e. things work. Generally Dynadot also seemed well liked in the relevant forums. Considering that it costs the registrar about $6 to register a .com, find one that has sensible but not extortionate margins. If they sell domains at $5.99, etc….

My favourite registrar is 123-reg. Their cpanel is very nice. I was making some dns entries for a client on their registrar lowcostnames.somethingorother and i could only have a maximum of 5 entries.

Which is rubbish.

fastdomain.com is pretty good and it’s 7 dollars a year. it’s one of the most reliable hots. I think it is affiliated with BH.

I am not sure.

Update:

Looks like registerfly.com is back online.  After two hours of messing around I finally have all my domains set to be transferred to another registrar…woohoo!

Get in while you can folks!

Hey, Beanlover, I finally sorted this out tonight and got sidetracked into reading some of the sordid saga. Great stuff. What other registrar can sport a CEO who, allegedly, taps the company accounts for a Miami penthouse, escorts and even liposuction. And only 75,000 domains got lost somewhere between the ladies arriving and the fat departing…

I have 13 domains registered via Registerfly. A few weeks ago I experienced trouble when changing name servers of some of my domains. This issue has been resolved. Currently their site loads faster than ever before though.

Also, Registerfly has a new CEO now I guess?
http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-2-08mar07.htm

Not planning to go through the trouble of transferring all the domains yet. Think I’ll just wait, and maybe stay at Registerfly after all. Bad idea or not?

That’s the old CEO moving back in. Our guy in Miami. Take 3 minutes to read this and answer your own question:

http://www.icann.org/correspondence/registerfly-notice-of-breach-21feb07.pdf

It does seem that registerfly’s site is faster than it has ever been.  I have transferred away all my domains successfully and completely as of this morning.  I’m going to let things cool off over there and I may switch back after I see they can control themselves and their company.

Too bad it only takes one moron to really screw things up for a lot of people.

B

To summarize a few facts from the last couple of years:

1. They did not pay ICANN for accreditation and are still in arrears.
2. They do not pay the registries what they owe and new domains have thus not been processed, old ones have expired. Some of these were auctioned off.
3. Their risk/fraud dept. ran or runs on commission. Which means that they generate their income from a faulty system coupled with poor service leading to domains being held hostage and released for profit. Imagine a department looking for ways to kidnap your domain to feed themselves.
4. ICANN has found that the official records (Registered Name of TLD) they are required to keep are a either non-existent, lacking or a mess.

No single man was behind this monster. If I was looking for a webhost, I might ping servers for response times…

Okay, I read some more about the whole Registerfly story. It is a big mess. This morning I decided to move away from Registerfly. Transferring everything to Moniker now. Hope the process goes fast and smoothly.

Try namecheap. My favorite so far.

Coming from RegisterFly anything is better.  I moved all my domains to GoDaddy about two months ago.  Pleased so far.

RegisterFly jacked with me a few times, blaming non-workings of the control panel on “system upgrades” for a few days.  Said they could not help me manually, and to just wait a few days and try again.

That was enough for me to see that they weren’t functioning as a company should.