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The Internet Government The Courts News

850K RegisterFly Domains Moved To GoDaddy 120

Posted by kdawson from the end-of-a-sad-saga dept.
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."
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850K RegisterFly Domains Moved To GoDaddy More

850K RegisterFly Domains Moved To GoDaddy

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  • Is RegisterFly a publicly traded company? I'd like to invest.
  • Why godaddy? Why could people not chose what register to transfer to?

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

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

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by neoform ( 551705 )

        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: (Score:2)

            by neoform ( 551705 )
            I was one of those delightfully luck people who got slapped with the $200 extortion fine where they threatened to release my domain if i didn't pay them off because they received a spam report that apparently showed me to be a spammer (a single anonymous email reporting it).

            I had to deal with their tech support for 2 days spending hours on hold talking to countless people before i could convince them to allow me to transfer the domain (they rejected all transfer requests).

            Yeah, GoDaddy's a real peach. :|

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Puppet Master ( 19479 )
        ...probably approached ICANN with a canned solution ready to go...

        Actually GoDaddy approached Registerfly alone, outside of ICANN.
        The deal was made on the back end. Kevin Medina
        had to know this was his best alternative because ICANN
        was/is suing the pants off of him.

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

      by gbulmash ( 688770 ) * <semi_famousNO@SPAMyahoo.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: (Score:2)

        by rs79 ( 71822 )
        Ya know, what strikes me as odd is this: back in the pre-ICANN era when the formation of the "newco" to administer domains was all the rage on mailing lists everywhere there was a substantial show of support for the notion we don't actually need a corporation to do this sort of thing and that an industry trade association would work instead. And if that wasn't working there was always the court system to fall back on in cases of dire emergancy.

        The ICANN wonks asserted that private contracts with all players

    • 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]

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by edwdig ( 47888 )
          Do you really think the customers would have been better off with control of their domains staying with a defunct company?
          • Agreed. Unless moving away from GoDaddy requires a substantial cost or effort it seems like a reasonable solution.
          • The whole domain name service thing has become too corrupted by business. It's time to find another way. The only thing I can think of for now is to keep a personal hosts file. A real kludge, but if the business gets out of hand, I don't see a choice. I've already started as an attempt to reduce redirects by my ISP. It's hit 'n miss(mostly miss), but practice makes perfect. My aim is to make ICANN and GoDaddy, etc. irrelevant. Besides, what difference does it make if you stay with a defunct company or the l
      • "Win-win-win" -- except for the millions of new e-mails that GoDaddy will be sending those 850,000 new customers. Haven't they suffered enough already?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kimba ( 12893 )
      Registrants can transfer from Go Daddy to whichever registrar they like.
  • 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.

      • 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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      I have never noticed that godaddy is incompetent, just overly annoying with it's value added services. There was a time when GoDaddy was a great value, and in many ways still is, but shifting market forces have made other registrars, such as namecheap(not cheapnames, which appears to a godaddy shill), a equally good value without the barrage of special offers.

      About the only negative thing I can say about godaddy is that I could not transfer one of my domains, it expired, and now godaddy appears to be hol

    • 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) 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.
        • I agree, and I went ahead and transferred away my handful of domains from godaddy to enom. I'm sure enom has done bad things, but the point is to make godaddy aware that customers will take action ---I wrote them a nice email, pointing out many of the issues raised on nodaddy.com. Yea it's like spitting in the ocean, but one has to try. Perhaps someday we'll orchestrate a mass transfer day, where a whole bunch of us "reward" a chosen registar, while informing the others as to the reasons why.

          or not.

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

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

        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.

    • It's only Godaddy's parked domain names [slashdot.org] that run on Windows. If the domains that are transfered are sent to parked pages, Windows will only have a temporary spike until the domain owners update the information.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by LMacG ( 118321 )
      The story is about registrations, not hosting. Even so, GoDaddy offers both Windows and Linus hosting services.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by fo0bar ( 261207 )

        The story is about registrations, not hosting. Even so, GoDaddy offers both Windows and Linus hosting services.
        I don't think Linus would take GoDaddy up on Windows hosting.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by g0at ( 135364 )
      Do you understand the difference between DNS/WHOIS and HTTP?

      -b

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by makapuf ( 412290 )

        Do you understand the difference between DNS/WHOIS and HTTP?
        Yes hence I spoke of a percentage (parked domains) and not of the totality of sites. I might have to be more explicit next time.
    • Netcraft confirms it: Apache is DYING!
  • 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: (Score:1)

        by CaTfiSh ( 724 )
        Contact Tina at Axishost. They've been running specials, 2 for 1 on prepayment for hosting. You'll find competent, knowledgeable people to deal with.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by pnutjam ( 523990 )
        Take a good long look at NearlyFreeSpeech.net [nearlyfreespeech.net]
        They have been really good for me, and their prices can't be beat.

    • 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.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Knara ( 9377 )
              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

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Knara ( 9377 )
                Ehhh, that should have been "less than $200 a year" but y'know, wasn't paying attention

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by mcrbids ( 148650 )
            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 hosting outside the door is spent there for a reason: economies of scale.

            $7/month is cheap, folks. Here's an explanation:

            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 hosting outside the door is spent there for a reason: economies of scale.

            Alrighty, then. Let's grind the numb

          • But face it, $7/month for hosting isn't cheap.
            That's like the cost of a Happy Meal. How cheap *are* you anyways?
             
        • Dedicated hosting or colocation, people. Pay for an SLA!

          I used to think that until my dedicated server (at 1&1) needed a hard power reset (buggy server didn't always reboot) and it took them over four days to get around to pushing the button for me. Because it was rented, not colo'ed I couldn't even drive to NYC and press the reset button myself.

          After all, I was only one customer - if I was on a shared host they'd have dozens to hundreds of unhappy customers if the machine was down.

          I've gone to colo s

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Knara ( 9377 )
            How was your SLA on that? I'm serious. Thing is, yeah, if the company actually wants to service their customers, shared hosting (one would think), could result in a hundred people telling them something is broken instead of just one. *But* that assumes that the shared hosting is a major revenue stream, which sometimes is the case, and sometimes not. Varies from hoster to hoster. However, my point is that if you're managed hosting/colo and there's SLA's associated with that service you're paying for, y
            • How was your SLA on that? I'm serious.

              It was the [seemingly] typical, 99.999% uptime guarantee, fully disclaimed by the terms of service.

              I'm much happier now where I can replace the hardware as I see fit and go touch the box if needed. So far my old clunker Penguin Computing box is lightyears ahead of the "real colo" box I had before. Unless you bump it, of course, then the SCSI card comes unseated. ;)

  • hot chicks (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by jcgf ( 688310 )
    Am I the only one who doesn't think that the Godaddy girls aren't as hot as they are made out to be in the commercials? Particularly the one where she sinks the ship with the champagne bottle. I am so tired of that commercial that if I was looking for a domain I would (irrationally?) hold it against them.

    • Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)

      by EraserMouseMan ( 847479 )
      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
    • Really, can you afford to be that picky? The last time I checked, mentioning that I posted on /. caused women to swoon. Of course I don't date women that aren't supermodel/rocket scientists. And I'll be moving out of my parent's basement as soon as I land one.
  • So... if your domain is held hostage by RegisterFly, and during the time when you cannot renew it, it expires, what happens? We all know how domain slammers will buy it up within 30.2 seconds of expiring and becoming available again, which means that a lot of ordinary folks are out of a domain name. Scary.
    • Correction, it's 3/10ths of a second. If you tried to buy a domain 30 seconds after it was deleted you'd be too late.

    • 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.
  • 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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Derek Pomery ( 2028 )
      Well, they did put a notice on their site, just not exactly in a prominent place.
      https://registerfly.com/help/ [registerfly.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dkf ( 304284 )

      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.

      Hmm, that really depends on the nature of their original contract with RegisterFly. From what I remember of contract law, it will be the terms of that contract that GoDaddy will have to enforce, at least initially. Of course, the big bonus to the domain owners is that

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Animats ( 122034 )

        Contract transfer is complex. In general, you can sell an asset, like a loan due you, but not an obligation, like a loan you owe. There's something called a "bulk transfer of a business" in the US, where one business takes over another, both assets and liabilities. But that's not what happened here. GoDaddy didn't acquire RegisterFly, nor are they taking on RegisterFly's liabilities (like the class action suit).

        The point here is that domain owners who find themselves with GoDaddy as a registrar proba

    • For one thing, domain owners whose domains are now administered by GoDaddy have no contractual obligations to GoDaddy.
      Go Daddy will likely require the user to click the box beside "I have read the registration agreement and agree to its terms" before being able to log inside your domain name account with them. I'm sure getting a lawyer involved will not change that either.
  • 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.
  • ICANN sucks because it likes to treat itself as a powerless victim. If they showed some real leadership they might get some respect.

    How about, "All domain names are the property of their respective owners, and upon disreditation of a registrar ICANN will immediately move affected domains to an accredited registrar, from which the domain owner can further transfer their domains, if desired."

    • How about, "All domain names are the property of their respective owners, and upon disreditation of a registrar ICANN will immediately move affected domains to an accredited registrar, from which the domain owner can further transfer their domains, if desired."

      Not going to happen, especially when your registrar's contract defines your legal relationship to begin with. I realize people expect a lot from ICANN. But perhaps they ought to understand first what exactly they can and can't do, and why. Or do p

      • Not going to happen, especially when your registrar's contract

        Right, I'm suggesting ICANN require a specific acknowledgment of ownership of domains, and procedures for dealing with discreditation, as a condition of accreditation, both initially for new registrars and upon renewal for existing ones.

        Yes, it will make some registrars unhappy. I feel as bad for those kinds of registrars as I do for RegisterFly.
  • eww godaddy, thats not the company that ruin your domains if you post more than a pixel of person-flesh is it? I would rather my domain stopped working...

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