Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with registrar

How can I change to company Y for domain registration and hosting when I can't contact unreliable original company X?

Not Supplied — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 09:00:15 -0800

How can I change to company Y for domain registration and hosting when I can't contact unreliable original company X to do the change? In the UK. My friend has had domain hosting for a long time from this sketchy guy. He's never available to contact. I've been emailing him and phoning him for 2 weeks.

I am listed as the registrant and administrative contact for the domain names, but all the contact details are the dodgy hosting company.

Seems like he keeps his customers by just making it so bloody hard to switch to another company.

I've spoken to someone from godaddy.com about the process of switching both the domain name registration and the hosting to them. I'm not attached to using them but they seem cheap and ok for my friend.

Anyway they said I need to ask dodgy domain host guy to 1) unlock the domain 2) Change the administrative email to my address.

It seems fairly likely that this guy will stall and be uncooperative when I do finally get in touch so I'm not sure how to handle it. I'm thinking of writing a letter recorded delivery asking for the changes to be made. If I do this what articles of consumer law can I quote to back up our right to have him make the changes?

Is there another way of switching the domain registration and hosting without having to get the previous comanies approval?

Researching website options

titanium_geek — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 07:03:04 -0800

Researching options for all things website: hosting, domain name registration and DNS. Can you help me narrow it down? Hello Mefites, this is my first ask.mefi question. I'm writing a report for a 'professional writing' course. We will be assessed on the quality of the writing, not the content.

Scenario: you say "I would like a website for my small company."
I say: "Well, you need content (I have this covered), a domain name, and hosting."

What do I say next? I know I can google web hosting providers, but there are lots! What are the good and/or popular companies out there?

I have on the list already: GoDaddy (my own domain bought through them, looking to change.)
nearlyfreespeech.net
mediatemple

These are companies I've seen mentioned on my journeys around the web, but I'd like more recommendations please.

Sure.ly someone can help me...

andrewcilento — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:05:27 -0800

Does anyone have any experience purchasing .ly domains? Anything I should be aware of before I do? I'm thinking of purchasing a .ly domain name for a project I'd like to work on, and a couple of good ones are available. As far as I can tell, though, none of the bigger domain registrars offer .ly names; they only seem to be offered by Libyan registrars (which I suppose makes sense), so before I give them my money, I'd like to make sure I know about any possible pitfalls. Do any of you MeFites have any experience with this, and is there anything I should know?

Coop TLD Registrars?

thebigdeadwaltz — Mon, 11 May 2009 06:12:09 -0800

I'd really like to get a Coop TLD, but I'm having a hard time finding an affordable and easy-to-use registrar. Any recomendations for companies that do a good job with this TLD? Any experiences? I'd really like to be paying sub-$20/year.

What's the best way to buy international, especially European, TLDs?

Hartster — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 07:36:22 -0800

What's the best way to buy international, especially European, TLDs? [Seeing if anything's changed since this question]

I'm looking to buy TLDs for several European countries - Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Russia, Italy etc. Gandi.net has some, but not all. Is there anyone (or anyway) else I should be looking at? http://www.europeregistry.com/ looks ideal but they seem a) expensive and b) a quick Google doesn't inspire me with confidence. The name would definitely have to registered/owned by us, rather than owned by another company who lets us use the name, which is how some registrars seem to want to work.

If only Google were in the registrar business...

qxntpqbbbqxl — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 13:37:16 -0800

Need recommendations for a registrar with a soul I'm looking for a new registrar for a few personal domains. After I've transferred the domains, I want to be left alone: No promotional offer spam, no up-selling of extra services, and no pimping my contact info to third parties. The only "extra" I want is the ability to withhold my personal information from the domain record. I don't need hosting.

Previous questions have focused on cheap registrars, but I don't mind paying a few extra bucks to a company that respects my privacy.

Any suggestions?

(I've used Network Solutions and GoDaddy in the past; they are the antitheses of what I'm looking for)

Who to file a complaint with for a problem with a US locality domain registrar?

Anonymous — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 11:34:27 -0800

Who is the appropriate party to file a complaint with, for a problem with a US locality (*.portland.or.us, NOT *.us) domain registrar that is not updating DNS records as requested? Five years ago or so, it took over a year (not joking...) for the registrar update my DNS records and only after numerous emails, faxes, and letters. Time to move servers again, and I've already waited over a month with no results. The registrar's website says they are going to start charging for this wonderful service next year. Who can I complain to about their current service so I might see some action taken on my DNS request; who can I complain to to suggest *.portland.or.us domains be moved to another registrar?

How to get a .tv domain?

clockworkjoe — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 12:22:42 -0800

What's the best way to get a .tv domain without paying too much? I already have a hosting account on bluehost.com so I want register the domain and then transfer it to bluehost. Which registrar should I use? Sites like channelme don't spell out their deals so I don't want to fall victim to a bad deal. I thought perhaps some of the veteran web gurus here might know the best way to secure a .tv domain.

Why does this feel so much like a legal scam?

Anonymous — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 06:00:25 -0800

Was I scammed by a domain name registrar? Should I legally be able to get my money back for unavailable domains despite not having read their terms & conditions? A month ago, my friend and I pooled together and purchased numerous domain names from a small-time registrar in a top-level domain landrush (domains would all be released at once, multiple bidders would result in an auction). The idea was that if we were the sole bidders for any domains, they would be worth to us at least what we paid. Just today, the registrar notified us that (1) many of them are unavailable/invalid and we will only receive store credit for them. (2) Additionally, if we lose the auction for the domain, our registration fees would not be refunded at all. The registrar claims that these policies were stated in their Terms and Conditions; alas we did not click through to read them.

Do we have any legal ground (consumer rights?) for getting our money back? It seems like such a scam -- for domains in situation (1) I buy a product that is unavailable, and I only get store credit. In (2) they get to keep the domain registration fee from everyone who bought the domain which is only eventually registered once. It's like if I sell a $50 watch, but if there are multiple bidders, it goes to auction and I still keep all the $50s.

If I did a chargeback with my credit card, the bank would probably side with the company because I agreed to these terms during my purchase.

Other facts:
- The receipt shows the purchase of every single domain as "Domain Purchase: foo.com"
- This practice is divergent from the policies of the other major registrars in this landrush
- My account credit has even decreased, because they are based on the UK and credited in Pounds, which has devalued since. I didn't even know it was a UK company since the prices were in US dollars, and I made the purchase using a credit card.

Posting anonymously in case we decide to go to small claims court or something, and would not like this to be used as any sort of evidence.

Registrar w/ bulletproof mail redirect?

skywhite — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 06:18:24 -0800

Registrar w/ bulletproof mail redirect? For several years I have been content with service on my dozen domain registrations with my old registrar, but no longer. I recently registered a .com domain and created one email redirect and one webmail account but neither work. I had to hunt on the registrar's site for the contact-form and never received an automated email with a ticket number. (UPDATE: finally got an automated email this very minute.)

I'm looking for a registrar which offers superlative mail forwarding. I don't really need webmail or hosting or spam protection -- just rock solid redirect from a registrar who isn't going away and has a good reputation. I'm currently paying US $15/year per domain (a mix of European and American domains) -- offering 5 webmail accounts and 1,000 redirects per domain, and I would be willing to continue to pay in that range.

e.g. .ie

jeffamaphone — Wed, 30 May 2007 10:17:31 -0800

Ireland Internet Question: I want to register a .ie domain. Who is a reliable registrar? Who are the ones to avoid? What was your experience? By reliable I mean such things as: trust with my credit card number, they are responsive to tech support, they aren't going to go selling my e-mail address to every spammer in the world, etc.

If there is one that I should surely avoid, please let me know, and why.

Thanks!

DNS/Registrar/Hosting questions galore!

filmgeek — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 10:39:34 -0800

Registrar & DNS Quetions Galore. How do I setup with a registrar my domains so they point to my hosted directories? Email/site/setup question.
I have two sites, one that I want to point to a .mac account (that'd be web.mac.com
\myusername) and a typepad account (myusername.typepad.com\blogname).

I don't want to use redirected frames, but rather just have my urls go to the right place.

I intend to use Google's Apps (google/a) for my email (for both.)
My registrar isn't very helpful (directnic.com).

My question are:
1) This is possible to do, right?
2) Where can I go to get the registrar/DNS stuff that has the services I need?
I don't mind transferring my sites (and probably would prefer to.) Stability is important - as I have a hosting company that bugged out on me (taking a valuable name)
3) Bonus: How hard is it to get a registrar to correct the DNS record when you're listed (as owner) but do not have an account with them? Registrar is WildWestDomains

NoDaddy

DU — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 11:09:07 -0800

Getting screwed by a domain registrant. [NOT REGISTERFLY] I have two domains with GoDaddy, one expiring next month. I went to renew it and there was this $8.95 annual charge for "private registration". I'm pretty sure I remember putting that on there last year because it was free. But it's not worth the money so I thought I'd just remove it (the other domain doesn't have it, so what's the point?). That's not possible via the GD interface. When you try to "Manage Privacy", it links over to DomainsByProxy.com and wants you to log in. But there's no indication how you would do that--my GD login, customer number and domain name all don't work. I emailed GD about it and they said I'd have to contact DBP.

By now I'd already read a rant or two about this situation, so I told them that I didn't set up the relationship with DBP so I wasn't responsible for breaking it. I told them they had 24 hours to remove the unwanted charge or I'd switch registrars. 19 hours later they again said I'd have to contact DBP, so I just told them they have 5 more hours.

(Each of these emails generated an auto-reply telling me my ticket number. Just to see what would happen, I also emailed DBP. I got a ticket number in an email. The email and ticket number are the exact same format as the ones from GD. The message ID from both ends with " corp.gd". Turns out DBP *is* GoDaddy, this is all just a scam to charge $9/year per idiot who signs up for this feature.)

I am now fully intending to switch away from GD no matter what happens, but then I got this from them: Unfortunately, a transfer of a domain cannot not be completed while privacy is active on the domain name.

So I can't get rid of the feature and I can't terminate the relationship until I do. I called GD and they wouldn't escalate my issue, but they did walk me through how to change my email address on DBP (the claim is that that's why I never got contacted by them, though I call BS on that). This process will require photo ID, which is not only also BS but one of the rants I read said even this didn't work.

How can I cut this gordian knot?

How to transfer a domain away from a registrar that doesn't want to?

disclaimer — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 15:09:50 -0800

A client has a domain registered through a registrar that is (at best) unresponsive. We need to transfer it away from this registrar, but cannot get authorization. What now? The domain is registered via registerfly.com, a quick google reveals that they aren't held in high esteem.
A new client needs to update his website.
- The web developer is gone and the site appears to be hosted on godaddy.com servers (at least, I think that's who owns the IP block), but no one has the username or password (and even if he did, well, this just needs fixing).

- The domain contact information is registered to "FraudRecovery" with a contact email address of "risk@registerfly.com". Emailing that address has no response, and in fact other websites show that it's a known black hole. This information doesn't match anything my client has. Calling customer service results in 30 minute (or longer) wait times, sometimes ending in a hangup.
- We have tried to transfer the domain, but the transfer fails because registerfly doesn't respond with an authorization code (and the new registrar needs that code to proceed).

My plan was to (a) transfer the domain to a reputable registrar, (b) pick a new web hosting company (c) Rip the existing content from the existing site (d) update the site and provide the client with a properly registered, hosted, and documented site. However, step (a) is killing me.

What recourse does my client have? I know there may be a process at ICANN (I looked but nothing appeared to cover this possibility) - does anyone have experience with this situation?

A kicker is that the domain name is heavily publicized (it's a restaurant chain) so abandoning it is not a good option.
Any suggestions are welcome and thanks in advance.

How to transfer a domain name from a non-existent entity

wolftrouble — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 11:03:42 -0800

Domain ownership transfer question, with a few... Complications. In advance, I apologize if this question has already been asked & answered. I went through a bunch of the old questions and was unable to find one that matched this problem close enough to be useful.

Until recently, I'd owned a domain (let's call it xyz.com, as a pseudonym) for a very long time -- Since 1994, as a matter of fact. I got tired of running my own site, and decided to sell off the domain. I found a (corporate) buyer, negotiated a price, and we began the transfer process.

Their IT guy was essentially driving the transfer, and the first step he took was to request a transfer to his registrar, an address change, and contact changes. Not a problem, I took care of what I need to on my end, he took care of his, and it was completed without incident. Note that this was only a registrar + contacts change, NOT ownership!

So step 2 of the process was/is to try and transfer domain *ownership* to them, and here's where we're hitting a snag.

See, when I registered this domain, this was back in the day when I'd call up the InterNIC (I was hostmaster for an ISP at the time) and ask for a domain name. There was a cursory form to fill out, but mostly it was just ringing them up and saying, "I want xyz.com, here's the info, thanks." At the time I had a joke company name, let's call it Fiddle Dee Dee, and I registered the domain under that company name. I assume you're starting to see the problem here.

Eventually InterNIC's registration services went to Network Solutions, and from there I transfered to another registrar back in probably 1998. At no time did I bother to try and change the name of the company; there was no reason to. I kept the tech/admin/billing contact information up to date, of course, and the company name never became an issue, until now.

Now that the domain's with the new registrar, the buyer for xyz.com obviously wants to change the ownership to them. No problem, sez the new registrar, just have the old owner present articles of incorporation for Fiddle Dee Dee, send them to us registered mail, etc. No such company exists, it never did. And to make matters more complicated, as a result of the registrar transfer (and accompanying contacts updates), there's nothing at all listed in the whois record for xyz.com that mentions my name anywhere, period. I could just as easily be Joe Shmoe calling up and saying, "Hey, yeah, I'm the old owner of xyz.com, trust me on this, and give it to these other guys, thanks." I'm not the owner, I'm not a contact, my address isn't the owner address any longer, etc.

There has to be some method registrars use for addressing this problem, for all intents and purposes this domain is orphaned. The supposed owner doesn't exist, at all, and the new owners have no way of proving this. I can't even do something drastic like cancel the domain and let them re-register it.

I'll talk to the registrar, of course, but I wanted to hear if anyone else has ever run into this situation, and what they did to resolve it (if it got resolved).

Mater of our own domain names?

ph00dz — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 06:03:29 -0800

Becoming your own domain registrar? I work for a hosting company which registers around 300 domains for customers each week. We've got DNS, web servers, and all the basic stuff sorted out and humming along nicely, but still rely on an outside vendor to do our domain registration.

Since even saving a buck or two per domain can create substantial savings over time, we'd love to cut out the middle man. We'd also like a little more control over the process as well, since these days, any kind of substantial delay between a customer domain search and the aquisition of a domain can lead to it getting grabbed by an evil registrar.

If we were just looking for speed, there are other alternatives -- several of the domain registrars provide XML api's, which we could (and do) deal with no problem, but if it's not that big of a deal to go one step further... we're a bunch of linux dorks and I think we can probably sort it out. I'm just trying to figure out if it's worth our time.

I've found a basic page about accreditation from ICANN, but it doesn't really answer all my questions.

What's the base price of a domain from ICANN? GoDaddy claims it's only $0.25 per year... but I couldn't find any other references or breakdown per top level domain.

Has anyone out there set something like this up? How are the technical requirements? Was it difficult to get it all working with ICANN, or was it all reasonably straightforward?

whois archive?

pissfactory — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 12:30:27 -0800

How can you find the previous owner of a domain name that has expired, then been reregistered?

Expiring Domain Name Help

kmel — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 09:48:47 -0800

I'm interested in buying an expiring domain name (currently it's in redemption period). Most of the info I've found is vague, outdated, or doesn't answer my specific questions. Help me strategize! The name is made up of two short common English words which in combination make a very uncommonly-used phrase. It's not similar to any business or geographical name that I can think of. I know it's hard to assess the value of a domain based on just this info but I include it in case it's helpful.

I've read this extremely helpful post so I'm familiar with all domain-snatching services. The whole system sounds awfully shady -- not only during the auction process but after, when it comes time to transfer the domain to your preferred registrar and host. So I'd like to minimize my involvement in it while maximizing my chances to get the name (at the lowest price, of course).

The domain is currently with Dotster and, FWIW, I am currently have a handful of other domains registered with them. They say they release their names "exclusively" to namewinner.com first -- but if they offer any guarantees, I sure can't find them. Should I enlist the services of other domain snatchers as well? Or should I forget it all and go it alone?

I guess .eu would be easier, but we want country TLDs too.

namespan — Sat, 06 May 2006 11:56:14 -0800

Any word on what the some of the most credible, competent, and friendly domain name registrars are for European TLDs? Looking at registering some stuff for Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy, possibly Germany and others later.

Looking for a Multi-TLD Domain Registrar

libertaduno — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 07:43:41 -0800

I'm looking for a multi-TLD domain registrar, the registrar where i can register/transfer/hold the largest number of TLDs, for example not just .com, .net, .org but also country domains from all over the world. thanks!

Help me find a good domain name

Nelson — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 06:04:57 -0800

How do I pick a good domain name for my blog and email? I'd like to have my own clever .com name. Everytime I come up with something find it's already taken, either by a spammy domain parking service that wants thousands of dollars for the name or else some long dead site whose contact doesn't answer email. How do I find a name that's memorable, and clever, and available for not much money? .com only, which is a bit limiting.

I just bought nelsonminar.com, but that's really uncreative. How do I be a cool kid like waxy.org or megnut.com or the like? I guess what would be ideal is a list of available names that don't cost thousands of dollars.

Who's the best domain registrar that isn't godaddy?

bryce — Fri, 08 Jul 2005 07:46:41 -0800

What's the best domain registrar in terms of service and price not including godaddy.com? I don't want to support godaddy's pro-torture CEO.

With Dreamhost now supporting Ruby on Rails, I'm considering moving my account there. I think they have free domain registration, so that woud be pretty cool.

.IN Registrar.

chrisroberts — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 10:24:42 -0800

I am looking for a good/reputable domain registrar that can register .IN domains. Currently, I use godaddy and have a .CN address through moniker. Most of the .IN registrars are located in India or some where in Asia. While I would prefer to have an American or European based registrar, I am considering using one of the few I have found. So, can anyone give me any suggestions or feedback about what registrars they have found and liked capable of .IN registration.

Is it best to register a domain by proxy?

Prospero — Mon, 21 Jun 2004 17:40:04 -0800

I want to register a domain, which I've never done before. Is it best to register a domain by proxy? Also, is Godaddy.com good for this kind of thing?

Registrar cheaper than register.com?

dobbs — Fri, 05 Mar 2004 20:44:41 -0800

Registrar that allows you to register .to domains? I know register.com does it but they want us$225 for it. Anyone know of any cheaper ones? (I checked a bunch and none seem to offer it.)