Here’s the Cliffs Notes version of this post: 

REGISTERFLY.COM IS SUPER BAD. STAY AWAY.

Over the last several years, I’ve used Registerfly.com to register various domains that I own — along with a couple of other registrars/hosts.  Usually no problems – it was pretty straight-forward, self-service domain management at decent pricing - usually $8/year.  Their control panel let me do everything I needed to do.  I was happy to know find out that their office (back then) was listed locally – pretty close to me, so I felt good about supporting a local company.  Now it looks like they’ve moved officially according to listed addresses.

Now, over the last year their service hit some major bumps in my view, loosing settings that I set-up without notice.  They apparently got into a fight with enom, the registrar they were utilizing this past year and it got ugly.  I’ve gotten several emails on both sides pointing fingers at each other and tell me to keep/change my registrar.  Not pretty, keep me out of it.  I just want a registrar for my domains, not get involved in petty catfights via emails, etc.

Last week, I tried to renew 3 domains that were expiring.  However, after charging my credit card twice for the 3 domain renews $26.97 each time, the domains “failed” to be renewed and now have expired.  Two of them are still live, 1 of them is dead.  Of course, since they have expired, I don’t have access to the “authorization code” to transfer them out of the account.

No answers to multiple trouble tickets filed.  No answers to the eternal hold on their phone customer service line (over 4 hours on hold a couple times this week, and they don’t have any soothing background music either).  Thank goodness that I have speaker phone and can just let it sit while I work at my desk.  Once I even went out to the grocery store and came back and the hold was still on hold during that 4+ hour hold session.

Today after doing a quick search for “registerfly sucks” and “registerfly complaints” (a great way to find dirt on companies you are thinking about doing business with) I found out that their Registerfly’s ICANN registrar status has been pulled in March 2007, and I was supposed to have received a notice 2 weeks before the termination date back in March (I got nada!).  The official letter from ICANN to Registerfly details the breaches and kicks them out.  Bob Parsons over at GoDaddy has been blogging about it too…

So I have to wait until the end of the current billing cycle to file a complaint with American Express.  I’ve just filed an official complaint with the BBB at http://complaint.bbb.org and I’ve also filed a complaint with ICANN directly, although these will probably not do anything for me in the end.

And I’m now heading over to 1and1 Internet, my register of choice right now to try and transfer the rest of my registerfly active domains.  And I’m going to sign-up for Globat’s 1 year free hosting (with free domain registration) after rebate to test them out as well.

I’ll post updates of this saga with my trapped domains at Registerfly.com…ugh.