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850K RegisterFly Domains Moved To GoDaddy

Posted by kdawson on Tue May 29, 2007 01:05 PM
from the end-of-a-sad-saga dept.
The Internet Government The Courts News
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."
+ -
story

Related Stories

[+] Some Hope During Registerfly's Meltdown 123 comments
hookmeister writes "If you registered your domain at Registerfly.com, then you should know it may be locked, and you are at the moment unable to access it through Registerfly's website (video). You may even be unable to renew your domain because it has expired into a status known as 'redemption' through no fault of your own. By all accounts there are just under 2 million domains at risk here. Enom dumped them as a reseller; their SSL cert has expired; it's a mess. Fortunately the principals in this are trying to restore order. The external website registerflies.com, originally crafted as a gripe-zone and forum for Registerfly users, has gotten inside the ranks of the post-shakup Registerfly management, made some friends and connections, and is creating a back-door problem-reporting form that goes directly to those who can correct a domain problem. The official Registerfly support ticketing system remains clogged with thousands of unanswered complaints."
[+] ICANN May Act Against RegisterFly 63 comments
1sockchuck writes "ICANN says it will terminate RegisterFly's accreditation as a domain registrar if the company can't fix its problems within 15 days. The edict comes with RegisterFly in chaos and current management blaming a departed executive for its woes. The situation is complicated by the fact that RegisterFly sold some of its domains through a reseller agreement with eNom, and others using its own accreditation."
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850K RegisterFly Domains Moved To GoDaddy 50 Comments More /

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  • Is RegisterFly a publicly traded company? I'd like to invest.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by gnuman99 (746007)
        Er, no. It is easy to transfer. And also they don't deal with commie countries like Cuba. I'd say GoDaddy is more of a company that lapdances for the US foreign policy. (see GoDaddy terms of service)

        Aside: If GoDaddy.com wanted to help Cubans, they would want them to have as much access to the Internet as possible instead of filtering Cuban ips from resolving DNS for domains hosted at GoDaddy.

        Aside 2: And if Cuba is so bad that US has a trade embargo against it, why not have a similar one against China? Oh,

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by gfilion (80497)

          Aside 2: And if Cuba is so bad that US has a trade embargo against it, why not have a similar one against China? Oh, wait, it's about the money stupid!

          Actually, the US has put an embargo against Cuba since Fido Castro threw the US business out of the country without compensation -- effectively stealing their properties. The whole story is more complex than that, you can read it on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].

  • Well, this should allow us to finally answer the long-standing question: "Is GoDaddy better than a bunch of thieving incompetents?"

    • Theres a lot of hate for Godaddy. I thought I was the only one. Personally, Godaddy reminds me of Ronco, Vonage, or perhaps Lesko. Their marketing division is at least on par with those three.

      On an unrelated note, who wears a suit covered in question marks?
      • Man, that's an easy one. The Riddler.

      • Theres a lot of hate for Godaddy. I thought I was the only one. Personally, Godaddy reminds me of Ronco, Vonage, or perhaps Lesko. Their marketing division is at least on par with those three.

        I've moved all of my domains that were once registered with godaddy for exactly that reason.

        On an unrelated note, who wears a suit covered in question marks?

        The Riddler.

        No, I know who you're talking about, can't remember his name for the life of me, though.

        • No, I know who you're talking about, can't remember his name for the life of me, though.
          Lesko.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by drinkypoo (153816)

        Theres a lot of hate for Godaddy. I thought I was the only one. Personally, Godaddy reminds me of Ronco, Vonage, or perhaps Lesko. Their marketing division is at least on par with those three.

        GoDaddy is pure concentrated evil. They are known to park pages on domains whose names you've looked up. If the domain gets many hits, they keep it and you end up having to buy it at an increased rate. If it doesn't, it's later released back for sale.

        Never use GoDaddy for ANYTHING. They are malicious, evil, greedy fu

    • I've used GoDaddy plenty of times in the past with no problems. 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. I'm sure similar situations have happened with other registrars too.

      --
      Free T-Shirt Contest [winstonspals.com]. Submit your pet's picture and story.
      • "I've used GoDaddy plenty of times in the past with no problems."

        Sounds like you've never been on the wrong side of a media conglomerate.

        Then again, neither have I, which would also explain why I've never had problems with GoDaddy either. That story referenced by GP certainly gives me pause, at least.

      • "First they came for..." (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Gogl (125883) on Tuesday May 29 2007, @01:36PM (#19312023) Homepage Journal
        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.

      • Re:And if you had your domain transferred to GoDad (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Vellmont (569020) on Tuesday May 29 2007, @01:47PM (#19312159)

        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.
      • I've supported the U.S. Government plenty of times in the past with no problems. Imagine the sheer number of people they have in their files, if only a few get tortured here and there it's probably a negligible percentage. I'm sure similar situations have happened with other countries' governments too.
  • So you transfer these poor folks' domains from one registrar known for shady practices to [slashdot.org] another [slashdot.org]? How about at least transferring them to an OpenSRS registrar, or (gasp!) releasing all holds on the domains and giving the customer the choice of where to transfer to?
  • This reminds me of when Register.com faced delisting [google.com]. I wondered what would happen to my domains which were registered their at the time should they have gone under... At one point in time, they (register.com) were the only ones next to then Network Solutions who had the accreditation to register domain names (1998-1999ish) -- and shortly afterwards others were allowed to become registrars... Anyhow, back then - even now perhaps - there was little one could do in matters to moving domain names between regis

  • netcraft change ? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by makapuf (412290) on Tuesday May 29 2007, @01:22PM (#19311875)
    I don't know what registerfly ran on, but given that godaddy seems to be on windows, it might be that a sizeable % of those 850k domains will be counted as "windows" in 1,2,3 ... therefore confirming imminent apache death.
  • GoDaddy.com might not be a big improvement. I know that I've not been impressed with them at all. I don't care HOW cheap their hosting gets, I'll certainly never host anything with them again. The hosting company I normally use is about $7 a month. I get a live English speaking CLUE-FUL human no matter what time I call tech support and I seldom have to call. By comparison, GoDaddy is about $3 a month and I've spent more time on the phone with GoDaddy than I do with my mother. Our connections to our da
    • The hosting company I normally use is about $7 a month. I get a live English speaking CLUE-FUL human no matter what time I call tech support and I seldom have to call.

      You want to give them a shout-out? I'm always looking for recommendations for solid hosting providers. (I used to recommend FatCow, and they really are nice guys there, but you have to pay a year in advance to get their $8.25/mo rate.)

    • Re:If My Experience is Any Indication.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by TooMuchToDo (882796) on Tuesday May 29 2007, @01:39PM (#19312053)
      How about you pay more then $3/month if you want reliable hosting, eh? You get what you pay for.

      • Re:If My Experience is Any Indication.... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Knara (9377) on Tuesday May 29 2007, @01:45PM (#19312129)

        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!

        • And I to, unable to mod due to my post. Rare is it nowadays you find technical people competent enough to understand the need to pay for quality web hosting. I raise my beer to you sir!

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by wfberg (24378)
          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!

          I've seen this bandied about on dreamhost's forums before. But face it, $7/month for hosting isn't cheap. I could run my puny little website off my home PC and ADSL line with no problem, so any money at all that's spent on ho

          • Re:If My Experience is Any Indication.... (Score:5, Insightful)

            by OverlordQ (264228) on Tuesday May 29 2007, @02:32PM (#19312875) Journal
            $7 a month *is* cheap. Come back after buying some real servers.
            • Pretty much. It still boils down to "if you want your hosting company to be financially accountable for downtime, make them contractually responsible for uptime". Lots of hosting companies offer this for dedicated hosting services. None of them offer it for shared hosting (that I know of, at least). $200 for a year of hosting with the resources allotted by Dreamhost's basic-level shared-hosting plan is mega-cheap. Anyone who doesn't think so doesn't understand the logistics of being a major hosting pro
              • Ehhh, that should have been "less than $200 a year" but y'know, wasn't paying attention
  • My condolences for your troubles. I'd be annoyed if I had to use GoDaddy, too.
  • Perhaps better than no access but I wonder what kind of agreement they had to sign. A friend of mine had a GoDaddy site, and when he wanted to move it to his own server, domain name and all, GoDaddy more or less refused to let him. After a couple months battling, he had to threaten a lawsuit for them to release his domain name.

    Since then and all the drama I had to see him go through it left a bad taste in my mouth for the company.

  • Progress, sort of (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Animats (122034) on Tuesday May 29 2007, @02:06PM (#19312441) Homepage

    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.

  • I can testify as a user of godaddy. This is not a happy ending.
  • The Registerfly frontpage makes no mention of any ICANN-enforced doom, and indeed, their order system still lets you register new domain names. I wasn't willing to shell out the $10 to test if it would actually complete the order, but I have a feeling it would. Which would make them a scammer site. I wonder if we could get Google/Firefox to add them to their warn-on-view lists.

    • Re:Why godaddy? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by eln (21727) on Tuesday May 29 2007, @01:16PM (#19311797) Homepage
      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.

      • Now that customers have control over their domains again, they should be able to transfer them to whatever registrar they want.


        I see you haven't dealt with Godaddy's tech support much..

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Southpaw018 (793465) *
          Er...first, my experiences with their support have all been good, and as far as they go I'm definitely a small fish. Second, why do you even need tech support to transfer? Log in to your account, go to the domain control panel, and transfer it. The link's right there. Last time I transferred a domain from GoDaddy to another registrar, the initiation was done in under 5 minutes. Then there's the few day wait time for the transfer, and that's it.

    • Re:Why godaddy? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by gbulmash (688770) * <semi_famous&yahoo,com> on Tuesday May 29 2007, @01:17PM (#19311805) Homepage Journal
      "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
      • I hope that the people whose domain got transferred might take some time to overthink if choosing for the low-budget high-volume registrant was a good idea after all. Maybe they can find a more expensive solution that will actually do the trick in a reliable way, with decent service. Domain registration is about the smallest cost of the total costs for an internet service, why get scroogy on it? I pay about 14 euro now at the locally based server farm that also hosts my site, I could get it for less than 7

    • Re:Why godaddy? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 29 2007, @01:19PM (#19311845)
      Because GoDaddy offered a wad of cash to Registerfly to buy their customers. (ICANN called it a "commercial transaction" [icann.org]) 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.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by iminplaya (723125)
        A win-win-win deal, more or less.

        Maybe for GoDaddy and Registerfly. Certainly not for the customers [slashdot.org]
        • Do you really think the customers would have been better off with control of their domains staying with a defunct company?
    • Personally, I'm a software developer running my own dev company. We've got servers and domains, etc. My friends think I'm somewhat of a brainiac type. But I'm really an average joe with many hands-on skills as well. I don't like being pigeonholed as just a nerd or a geek.

      When GoDaddy comercials air I make a special effort to rep my registrar. You've got to admit, there's something cool and masculine about a domain registrar run by a former Marine that uses sexy women to sell domains. It's not your averag
      • Call me jaded, but I don't think UF has any problem paying their hosting bills.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Kalriath (849904)
      Currently, all RegisterFly domains are (supposed to have been) placed into serverDeleteProhibited status, which means the Central Registry (Verisign) is not able to actually expire them... they remain perpetually locked until they are changed back to pendingRelease, clientTransferProhibited, or some other status. In other words, they can't expire until the mass transfer.

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