Registrar warning

[shadowfyre]

I thought a bit about posting this - typically I don't like to bash other companies realizing that in the tech world - stuff happens and sometimes it is out of our control. So for the most part I like to give the benefit of the doubt.

That said - I would like to put out a general warning for a company that does domain registration and that company is names4ever.com.

Don't trust your domain with them unless you like headaches, need / feel the urge to have to regularly yell (when that is not typical of your character) at someone, or if you just pure and simply love downtime and enjoy having your clients calling you about it.

My first bad experience came in October when "poof" my service domain was gone. I was like mmmm what the heck and investigated only to find out that they didn't renew my domain. Well - not good considering that I had the domain set for "auto-renew" a valid credit card number listed - infact used that credit card to get them to manually reinstate my domain name, and when I said mmmmm how come I didn't get an email saying you were going to drop my domain they said system error, and I said what happened to auto-renew and they said wow - don't know but the option is checked. All this btw I manually verified a month before the domain name was due to expire. They thankfully got me up and going and I only experienced about 4 hours of downtime (then).

My 2nd experience of having to deal with them came when we had the IP issue in the beginning of March. I had my IP's set to old numbers- they informed me that the change would take 48 hours to fix it - and thankfully Vortech bailed me out and a few other people that day and reset the IP's back for us. Howerver on March 5th all of my nameservers were happily pinging to their correct numbers. Life is good again!

Today however was the kicker - I log in only to find my CP doesnt work anymore - then I am told by Vortech staff who answered me at 8 am their time - that your nameservers are set to the old numbers again. Now - I didn't set them back to the old numbers - infact I didnt even log into my registrar CP since March 3rd. It appears that a backup was used (an old one) to restore lost data on the servers and the old IP numbers were once populated through the service. I was told that it would be at least 24 hours before anything could be done to help fix this. I explained that wasnt acceptable considering that all sites associated with ns and ns1 are down - one site being an isp so all of their users down also. I got no where except to be told I was being unreasonable. Vortech even tried to help me out (kudos to you guys) but the numbers have been re-assigned to other boxes.

As soon as the IP issue is resolved I am transferring the domain from them. I just felt I should warn people to be extremely careful when dealing with this company - because frankly no one needs the headaches.

[Silverbug]

cheers for the heads up

[Light Speed]

If I was you I would go with a more established Registrar for my service domain. Is an extra $20 or so gonna kill you? It's worth the peace of mind.

[jmbeach]

Originally Posted by Light Speed

If I was you I would go with a more established Registrar for my service domain. Is an extra $20 or so gonna kill you? It's worth the peace of mind.

If you're talking about NetSol, they, in my opinion, are one of the worst registrars out there. Plus there are plenty of very good ones where you can still get domains for under $10.

The extra $20/domain can really add up if you have dozens of domains.

[Light Speed]

Originally Posted by jmbeach

If you're talking about NetSol, they, in my opinion, are one of the worst registrars out there. Plus there are plenty of very good ones where you can still get domains for under $10.

The extra $20/domain can really add up if you have dozens of domains.

You're right Network Solutions just plain sucks and I wouldn't let them close to any of my business.

I use Register.com for my service domain and some of my more important client domains and have had Zero problems.

I go with cheaper registration such as godaddy.com for my other less important domains.

If you have lots of domains it does add up quickly so why not at least put your service domain on a more established registrar to give you stable uptime and peace of mind and put the others on el cheapo?

[mresell]

Sorry you had those problems. You have to check them out ahead of time. That said the first problem you had...you should have moved, that is a pathetic scenario for a domain registrar. We all know hind sight is 20/20 Personally, anybody that is an ISP and Registrar(such as that company) I would be especially wary in dealings.

[shadowfyre]

Is there a way I can transfer my service domain without downtime? That is my biggest concern right now.

[mresell]

Why do you need to transfer? Do you just mean create new dns records w/ your new registrar? If that is the case...it shouldn't matter unless they won't let the domain be transferred. That would be problematic in any case.

Transferring a domain to another registrar won't cause downtime as long as your new registrar doesn't try to reset your nameservers... most of the time they let you keep the same ones or choose them when you transfer...

[jmbeach]

Originally Posted by shadowfyre

Is there a way I can transfer my service domain without downtime? That is my biggest concern right now.

If you have to transfer your service domain to another registrar, there wouldn't typically be downtime, but since other domains rely on your service domain's custom nameservers, there could be a bit of downtime - my guess would be a day or two, depending on who you transfer to.

If it were a domain with no custom nameserver entries, there is no downtime.

Originally Posted by Bladesnitz

Transferring a domain to another registrar won't cause downtime as long as your new registrar doesn't try to reset your nameservers... most of the time they let you keep the same ones or choose them when you transfer...

You can ignore my post above, Matt's probably right. I know I did have some issues with transferring, but maybe it was a fluke...