Registerfly's Accreditation Terminated by ICANN

Punker22 writes "Effective immediately ICANN has terminated RegisterFly.com's accreditation. Between now and 31 March RegisterFly is required to unlock and provide all necessary Authinfo codes to allow domain name transfers to occur. Any and all registrants wishing to transfer away from RegisterFly during this period should be allowed to do so efficiently and expeditiously. 'Terminating accreditation is the strongest measure ICANN is able to take against RegisterFly under its powers,' Dr. Paul Twomey, President and CEO of ICANN said today."

So when is it GoDaddy's turn? :p

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been trying to transfer my fiancee's small business domain from them over to DynDNS for about a month with no success. I tried initiating the transfer through GoDaddy's management tools (which seem to be really geared towards domain squatting, btw) and found nothing useful. It's a real rat's nest in there. Initiating the transfer from DynDNS got us nowhere. No transfer request notification is ever sent by GoDaddy, and everything silently fails a week or so later.

She's so frustrated with it that at this point, she'd rather wait for the domain to expire and just re-register with someone else. Understanding how easy it is for someone to snatch up a freshly expired domain, I'm thinking that's a bad idea.

Has anyone else had a similar problem (or success?) trying to transfer away from GoDaddy? We are running out of ideas.

Re:So when is it GoDaddy's turn? :p

[elmarkitse]

Have you tried calling into GoDaddy? Whenever there's an issue I can't resolve online, calling them produces great results. Try to lay off the 'you work for soul-less domain squatting evildoer company' when you ring in and just mention you'd tried to do a few transfers with no success. Their CS people will give you their name, an e-mail, and a way to get back in touch with them unless someone treats them like crap.

For domain management, their interface is great, especially if you have more than just a few domains. I have about 150 or so (no squatting, thank you) and basically just ignore everything about them except for the domain control panel.

If you just want to use DynDNS services, just point the domain's nameservers and you've got all the benefits without what has apparently been quite a hassle for you. I have transferred in and out of Godaddy well over 50 domain names and the only times I've had problems are with odd TLD extensions, usually because I don't have the right auth codes, and almost always from the other registrar, not GoDaddy.

Good luck

EK

Political Issue

[Frosty Piss]

A lot of people don't like GoDaddy because they gave up to pressure from some corporation or another and killed an offending domain. But I've had nothing but good luck with them. Their management tools are leaps and bounds better than many of the other services I've used, and just 100's of miles ahead of most of the free DSN joints. I've transfered dozens of domains without issue.

Your dislike of GoDaddy for political reasons may be valid, but functionally, they aren't bad at all.

Re:Political Issue

[Nezer]

I refuse to use GoDaddy simply because I find their television ads offensive and degrading to women.

Re:Political Issue

[fermion]

Killing a domain is not a political issue. It is a bussiness issue. One cannot run a reliable service if there is a chance that your domain might be pulled for arbitrary "offensive content"

That said, I have had no trouble with godaddy. The only reason I began to switch was thier increasing annoying registration process. It was just easier to register at another provider, a provider that gave extras for almost the same money. In particular I did not like the fact that godaddy encouraged people to register domains for the sole purpose of flipping them. I hate to want a domain only to find that someone has picked it up just to flip it.

It was in fact that process of looking for a less hostile registration process that lead me away form Godaddy. One of the places I tried, cheapnames.con, looked very similar to Godaddy. On surmise,with no evidence, this lead me to believe that godaddy might be losing lots of customers due to customer service issues, and rather than fix the service, they created another firm to try to catch them on the backend.

In the spirit of not putting all ones eggs in one basket, I have been using two registrars for the past year. I am now happy with the new provider, and recetly tried to move my last domain to the new provider. In spite of all my efforts, godaddy will not let me transfer. No matter. The domain expires soon, and I will not be in a hurry in go back.

You see, there are no political issues, just customer service issues. Although I was happy at godaddy, another service gives me a better value with less annoyances. All too often the paranoid business community creates these conspiracies to cover up their own incompetence and greed. They think that the liberals or conservatives are out to get them, when in fact the business leaders have just let their personal political beliefs distract them from the core function of a firm, which is to provide a good value in goods and service to the customer. Pretty much more of the US is agnostic enough not to care if the CEO is worrying the sheep, as long the value is good. It is, more often than not, the short sighted firms that brand themselves as "christian" or "conservative" or whatever in hopes of attracting those few people that shop on solely on the basis of politics. It can be a good strategy, because those people will buy the goods and services no matter the quality of price. Just look at Whole Food market, which I also like, but has gone down since it has become hip and mainstream political.

The Marketplace is not always right

[fm6]

I tried initiating the transfer through GoDaddy's management tools (which seem to be really geared towards domain squatting, btw)

Well, duh. That's what happens when you make domain registration an open market. Registration is not a complicated product, so the only way vendors can compete is price. The natural result is a service like GoDaddy which charges a few bucks for a single registration, and provides a corresponding level of service. And why is it news that they facilitate domain squatting? They (and a lot of other registrars) have been advertising cheap bulk registrations for years. And why shouldn't they? If we say, "Compete any way you can", this is the natural result.

If it were up to me, we'd go back to one having one registrar that charges $35/year for every second-level domain. No, better yet, raise it to $100 a year. Allow the registrar a reasonable profit, and put the rest of the money into something useful: research, or bridging the digital divide.

Shazam! No more domain squatting. It's not longer profitable. And that single registrar has every incentive to provide good service: if they don't, they lose their cash cow.

"No way! Why should I have to pay that much for my personal domain name??!!" Hey, if a vanity web site is that important to you, you should shell out. If not, get a third-level domain. When a web site contains nothing but family photos and rants about gun control, nobody cares whether its on JoeBlow.com or JoeBlow.CheapISP.com.

But of course that's never going to happen: ICANN couldn't possibly stand up to all the whinning that would result. So we're stuck with the current situation, and there's no use complaining about companies like GoDaddy. So you're just going to have to live with domain squatting. And remember that when it comes to registering your domain, you get what you pay for.

Re:NamesDirect

[stevel]

You must have either a short memory or you missed out on all the fun. NamesDirect suffered a massive meltdown of its DNS servers a few years back, leaving hundreds of thousands of domains in the dark for a week or more. They did not have sufficient capacity or redundancy in their servers and did not communicate with their customers for days. Perhaps it's better now, but as soon as I could, I transferred my domains out of there and would never return.

The registrar I've had the best luck with is eNom, though I left them for Registerfly a coup[le of years back (mainly because of pricing.) 10 of my 11 domains are out of Registerfly now (to a mixture of eNom and 1&1.)

I do use Dreamhost for hosting most of my sites and they've been good to me.