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So for anyone who’s even considering registering a domain name through RegisterFly.com, I beg you to consider otherwise.

Last year when we were first starting the business, it was every penny that needed to be saved. At the time RegisterFly was offering very cheap .com/.net domains and I figured it was a reputable website and it would be alright. They had even redesigned the website the week before so it was very streamlined and professional. Little did I know what I would be getting myself into about a year later.

December rolled up quite quickly and it was time to renew my domains. I had completely forgot about it until I received the first reminder from RegisterFly, so I will give them points for that, but not many…maybe just like a quarter of a point. Anyway, I logged in, entered my credit card number, and renewed my domains for an additional year. Easy right? Yea…

About a day before they’re due to expire, our company email stops working. I couldn’t understand why, it made no sense. We use Google’s hosted email so it HAD to work. :( I figured I’d try the website to make sure DNS was working correctly…and that’s when I saw it. The ugliest placeholder page for a domain that I’ve ever seen in my life. Not only was it visually unappealing, but it made my stomach turn to think we lost our prized corporate domain. I hadn’t even realized the severity of the situation until I processed the fact that I also lost my email address.

This couldn’t happen. It just wasn’t an option.

So to the phone I went, and I called up RegisterFly. After about 30 minutes on hold, some guy answered with a very very deep accent. I could barely understand him and even worse, he could barely understand me. I explained the situation to him very calmly and asked him what the issue was. He informed me to go through my account and ensure that I indeed renewed them. I didn’t need to check on this, I was 1000% positive that I had renewed the domains. I did it anyway to keep him happy. He asked me “Are your domains listed there under recent renewals?” and when I responded “Yes” his quick response was “Ok, well they take anywhere from 24 hours to 5 days to process.” I felt that was a little ridiculous, considering I knew they were an enom reseller and that when I register domains through namecheap (another enom reseller) the renewals are instant. I told him this, but…he didn’t seem to give a crap.

He told me he would “manually” renew it for me and it should be working in 6 hours. I really didn’t believe him, but I figured I had no choice but to be patient and wait.

Six hours flew by and the domain still wasn’t working. I called back. The same guy answered the phone. I told him the situation again, and this time I was a bit upset. I explained to him that it was an urgent matter and it needed to be tended to, this time, he told me I’d have to wait the 5 days (it was already the 4th day), so after pleading with him to get it going, I told him I’d call back tomorrow night.

That was a Saturday and on that Sunday I was busy so I couldn’t wait another 30 minutes to make the phone call, so Shaun went ahead and did it. He called that afternoon and guess what, the SAME GUY answered! I was absolutely astonished to hear that I’ve called three times and every time I spoke to the same support rep. I gave them the benefit of the doubt, but Shaun insisted that it was a 1 man operation. He asked to speak to someone else and the guy clearly told him: “Sorry, there’s no one else for you to speak to.”. Although, when Shaun questioned the RegisterFly.com company as a 1 man operation, he insisted that many people worked there, we just weren’t allowed to talk to them.

Shaun got no where. He called again on Sunday night, and guess what…the same guy answered. After pleading with him and verbally abusing him (Shaun’s fuse is very…very short), the guy told us it would be another 5 days for everything to complete.

At this point we were frustrated, but there was nothing else we could do. We registered a different TLD and got our email working again for the time being, so not all was lost.

The next day Shaun called enom. (We figured we’d go to the top) It turns out that they saw our domain in RegisterFly’s reseller account, but they couldn’t touch it due to the fact that we couldn’t prove we owned it. (We were using whois protection, which..might I add, according to enom is illegal and we could get our domain revoked for using it…who knew?) The woman at enom was very nice. She informed us that they just needed to manually login to their reseller account and renew it, and then we could do w/e we wanted with the domain name. Finally a good answer!

So we call RegisterFly, and guess who answers… Shaun tries to explain to him what enom has told us, but he refuses to listen and says we just need to wait a while longer. Grrrr, at this point, I’m ready to drive to New Jersey and strangle this guy, but I’ll reserve that for later.

It turns out, RegisterFly became an ICANN accredited registrar this year, and they made all new registrations under their own name, and the old ones were still under enom. Now here’s the tricky part, they felt the need to convert all of the enom domains, to their own. So essentially, they did “transfers” whenever people did domains renewals instead of renewing the domain. This allowed them to grab full control of the domain. The problem is, a transfer never goes smoothly and it could take up to a month for it to actually go through. Considering we only “renewed” the domain a week before it was due to expire, the transfer never had enough time to go through and now we have to wait it out. (I think…hopefully :() I have no problem with RegisterFly wanting to do this, but a heads up would of been nice, or something along the lines of “Hey make sure you renew your domain months before so you don’t have this issue…” I received none of those.

To date, I still don’t have my domain, and I’m still waiting. It’s been cutting into business and I’m very aggravated with RegisterFly. One man runs the entire company and he refuses to provide any sort of reasonable help. I’m not sure what my next action will be, but I’m determined to keep my domain!

Maybe I’ll call ICANN…