Tuesday, January 9th, 2007Registerfly hell
The warning:
I’m writing this post to warn everyone about the horrible experience I had with the domain name registrar Registerfly. If you have any domain names registered with them, stop reading this blog and transfer to a reputable registrar right now.
Top reasons Registerfly sucks:
- Nonexistent and/or incompetent support
- Unreliable DNS and MX administration
- UNBEARABLY bad administrative interface (slow, hangs, random logouts, terrible design)
The story:
Newshutch suffered some downtime this weekend due to a complete screwup by our registrar, Registerfly. I’ve used Registerfly for several years based on a good recommendation, and for most of that time they were fine. Unfortunately you don’t usually think about your registrar until something goes wrong.
On Friday afternoon I started getting notices from Uptime that Newshutch was down, then up, then down again. For me, www.newshutch.com was working just fine. Finally Doug emailed to tell me that newshutch.com was down and www.newshutch.com was working sporadically.
That’s when we realized that our registrar’s DNS records were broken. When we migrated to our new servers several weeks ago we had set “A” (for “Address”) records to resolve to our IP address like so: “*.newshutch.com A [ip]”. On Friday Registerfly decided to start interpreting the “*” as a literal asterisk instead of a wild card, even though it worked correctly in the past. The only thing I could do was create an “A” record for “www.newshutch.com”; there was no way to create a record for “newshutch.com”, so it remained dead.
“Ok fine, I’ll just get in touch with Registerfly support…” I thought. As of today, our support tickets from January 6th are STILL unanswered. I called support several times and got busy signals. Finally I did get through and had the pleasure of listening to dreadful hold music for 58 minutes. Finally some guy answered, but communication was difficult thanks to his heavy accent, the loud din of his bullpen, and what I assume was shoddy trans-global VOIP. I could not make the support guy understand my problem. He kept putting me on hold, presumably to talk to someone on his end with expertise, and then he’d ask me to try something that would fail. Finally I gave up and decided to transfer to a new registrar.
If you Google “Registerfly” many of the top results are sites about how incompetent and/or crooked Registerfly is. I prefer to assume total incompetence instead of malice, but that doesn’t mean they get a second chance.
