Some Hope During Registerfly's Meltdown 123
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."
Any recommended registrars out there? (Score:2, Interesting)
What is a reasonable registrar, these days?
What Happened? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Any recommended registrars out there? (Score:5, Interesting)
In short: Some guy was hosting automated archives of mailing lists. Someone sent a list of MySpace usernames and passwords through the list, which were automatically archived. MySpace threw a hissy fit. Instead of filing any legal paperwork, or even bothering to contact the owner, they went straight to GoDaddy and said "This site is hosting illegal content. Pull it down." GoDaddy complied, no questions asked. GoDaddy didn't contact the owner, either.
Note: the site wasn't even hosted with GoDaddy. GoDaddy was merely the registrar.
Long Time Coming (Score:3, Interesting)
http://fallingbullets.com/blog/2006/dec/10/regist
Thankfully, I managed to get all my domains back.
Demand that ICANN invoke para. 3.2.3 (Score:5, Interesting)
It's time for ICANN to invoke paragraph 3.2.3 of the Registrar Agreement [icann.org]. The Registrar then has ten days to provide a data dump of all their registrations, allowing bulk transfer of a failing registrar's data to another registrar.
personal experience at IYD.com (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Well (Score:5, Interesting)
Can enom be trusted? (Score:3, Interesting)
See this recent Slashdot story with recommended domain name registrars [slashdot.org].
Re:Registerfly? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually it turned out to be a small warehouse office space with a few servers and high school drop-outs for staff. The tie-in with the phone company was total BS and some sleuthing revealed that the other family business was closer to being a fertilizer business (no really!) than anything else. I got off that system just in time. I lost some things, but not much, people who waited a bit longer lost everything including access to their domains etc.
When I looked for a replacement I was much more careful to look for telltale signs that it was the same kind of, for lack of a better term "soft-fraud" operation. I think I got pretty good at it, but what scared me was the percentage of fairly well known companies that were using the same boilerplate text and generic graphics of their facilities. One thing I especially looked for was if no actual peoples names appeared on the web site. Big companies have "Chairmen" and "CEOs" who love to get their pictures on the corporate web site. These fly-by-night outfits on the other hand just have support contact numbers that go to an answering machine and not indication that anyone associated with the company wants their actual name to show up anywhere. You have to wonder why. Or maybe you don't.
I'm almost positive that Registerfly (and I think they had a hosting come-on too) was one of these fairly obvious scam operations. I'm SOOOO glad I stayed away.
My hope is that in the not too distant future Google and some other big names will get into the free-to-low-cost hosting and registration business and put these low-life vermin out of our misery.