January 9th, 2007
by NathanRegisterfly 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.
January 9th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
Hey, thanks for the update. I’m glad it’s back - I tried www on a whim once and could get my newshutch fix that way, but it’s nice to know what happened. I’ll stay away from them
January 12th, 2007 at 12:04 am
Hey,
Newshutch PageRank has changed to 5
Cool!
January 18th, 2007 at 9:12 am
I have to confirm that Registerfly really sucks ! I purchased some domains but after 2 weeks waiting they are still not able to register the domains. Support sucks, too. Stay away from them !!
January 18th, 2007 at 10:14 am
they are gonna be so sorry that they didn’t do anything about it!
January 19th, 2007 at 11:15 pm
lost one domain last year
losing another one as we speak
but finaly got all auth codes and transfering out’)
then, rewange comes.. sweet rewenge at last..
January 29th, 2007 at 6:05 am
WARNING
yes I confirm go away they lost my 4 domains and they keep the money! yes it is possible!!!
If you have problem also visit this website http://registerflies.com/ and File your complaint with Internic http://reports.internic.net/cgi/registrars/problem-report.cgi
Together we will be stronger against them. This is crook company !
January 30th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
I have been with RegisterFly for 2 years, and haven’t had any problems (well, minor ones) until now. Domain name renewal notices were sent to me at the begining of the year. I used my credit card, but was notified that it was declined. I tried several times to get it fixed, but no response. Then I received my credit card bill and surprise, there was the charge for my domain name renewal!
I’ve been still getting notices that my domain name is up for renewal, close to 20 by now, but still no answer to my many e-mails to try and resolve my problem. I have a website to run, and can’t take the chance that someone is going to screw up my hard work. I’ve since started the process to switch to a more responsible & credible registrar.
February 6th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
Add me to the list of people who have had problems with Registerfly. After they didn’t answer a support ticket for 5 days, I opened another second one on the same issue. After that didn’t get for 3 days, I simply emailed the support people directly (rather than use their web interface). Finally I got a response, but the response mainly just chastised me for opening multiple support tickets. Bleh… what a sucky company.
February 6th, 2007 at 3:53 pm
Enom has officially announced that they are no longer going to be associated with Registerfly.
http://registerflies.com/enom-done-with-registerfly-hooray-2.html
February 7th, 2007 at 4:38 pm
RegisterFly is the worst registrar out there by a long shot. They let one of my domains expire despite the fact that I renewed it weeks before expiration. It sat in RegisterFly’s own special version of purgatory until they finally released it to be registered by someone else. Their “support” is non-existant. I’m fully expecting the to try a name change since they are getting slammed all over the internet. Avoid this company like the plague! They are liars and frauds. And watch out for name changes so you don’t end up right back in their trap!
February 9th, 2007 at 11:33 am
RegisterFly is a terrible registrar. Just google Registerfly and you’ll see what I mean. Their renewal system is flawed or they are intentionally screwing people over. I once wainted on their on-line chat support for 4 hours before the connection got dropped. Good luck if anyone tries calling their support.