Over the last couple of weeks, Registerfly officially died.  Finally.

 

As a Registerfly.com customer myself, I can personally tell you that it’s a relief to have access to my domains again.

 

It all started for me as an affordable way to purchase some domains.  They had decent pricing – about $8/domaid and had a workable control panel that I was able to use self-serve pretty well.  I found out that they had an office in West Orange, NJ which was nearby enough to make me feel good about supporting a local hosting company.  As time went by the number of domains they registered grew and grew it seemed…they were supposedly the 15th largest registrar in the US.

 

In addition, their hosting packages seemed to mirror the value they were selling in domain registrations.  Hosting with Registerfly seemed ok for some of my NON-mission-critical businesses on the web.

 

Over the last year however, DNS settings were lost and reset without warning, I couldn’t make any changes to certain domains, when I tried to transfer them Registerfly would give me tons of hassles and hurdles to get an “authorization code” to do so, etc.

 

Finally, ICANN woke up and let GoDaddy buy out the database of 800,000+ domains at the top of this month.  However, I didn’t know about it until I read about it in the news — I have yet to receive anything official via email or snail mail letting me know about my Registerfly accounts.

 

In fact, the only way I initally found out was by doing a whois lookup for one of my domains.  Interestingly enough, it came up with GoDaddy in the WHOIS record.  That’s when I started to dig a little and found out that Bob Parsons over at GoDaddy made a deal to take over while the fiasco at Registerfly continues.

 

Personally I filed a complaint with the BBB in NJ where their address was listed, but the BBB sent me a letter 2 weeks ago stating the entity doesn’t exist at that location to their knowledge and have no idea where they are right now…basically a dead end in terms of the BBB.

 

Now, I’m glad that I haven’t been using them as my primary webhosting company.  I use 2 other hosting companies primarily at this point: Pair Networks and 1and1 Internet.

 

Webhost1and1 Internet is a rock-solid recommendation.  They are the world’s largest webhost.  They recently entered the US market a couple of years ago and now claim to be #5 in the US.  You’ve probably seen their advertising in major publications and across the web.

 

I’ve been pretty satisfied with their service and use them for this blog as well.  Their rates are very competitive at $5.99/domain registrations and hosting packages from $3/month and up.  The control panel is pretty flexible, and they give you a bunch of free software licenses when you sign-up for hosting – make sure you take advantage of those promotional items.  For example, you can get a FREE and fully legal copy of Microsoft Frontpage 2003 with a basic hosting package.  Or get email hosting for $0.99/month with free anti-virus built in, free webmail, email forward, 400 aliases and more.

 

There’s a lot of reasons why you should check out 1and1 Internet.  The one point that makes it a no-brainer is their money back guarantee.  Not many hosts have the combination of being 1) so large (they’re not going to break down because of a lover’s spat) 2) sell packages with real value 3) provide tech support (email and phone!) and 4) give free software (not just shareware or freeware).

 

 



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