March 28, 2007
 at 1:34 am
 in internet

Let’s start back in 2003. I decide that I’m going to begin a small hosting business. I do so and http://www.pylonhosting.com is born. I had registered the domain name through RegisterFly for the simple reason that they were recommended to me by a friend who was also in the hosting business For a while I have a lot of clients, I’m making a fair bit of money, and all is good in the world. But after I got neck deep in college work and an real job, I slowly began to let customers go and at this point I’m only hosting friends and my own sites.

Even though Pylon Hosting really isn’t a business anymore and for the sake of reason has ceased to exist, I still keep the domain name active and the account serves its purpose as file storage and my main bandwidth eater. I kept renewing the domain name with RegisterFly.com and couldn’t have been happier with their service. They were awesome, mainly because they were an eNom reseller at the time.

Fast forward to 2006. In February of that year, RegisterFly became their own ICANN accredited registrar. This is when things really started to slip. Their website began to have extreme problems, support literally dropped off the map, and the complaints started to go flying in. I heard about this and, due to my past experiences with RegisterFly, determined that it was just a bump in the road and they would rectify the situations immediately. Little did I know I wouldn’t feel the repercussions of that decision until now.

On March 17th of 2007, ICANN terminated RegisterFly.com’s accreditation thus forcing a plethora of problems on them. eNom severed all previous ties they had with RegisterFly and forcefully stripped back the domain names that had originally been registered while they were still an eNom reseller as they still had the rights to them.

On March 23rd, PylonHosting.com expired. This shouldn’t have been the case as I had auto-renew on. However, due to RegisterFly’s problems, this never went through, though RegisterFly’s site claimed it had gone through. My account was charged $12.99 to renew through PayPal, but I never got the domain name back. I then went ahead and registered an account on Godaddy.com and began the process of transferring over all of my domains, PylonHosting.com included. It was successful, however, I still needed the authorization code from RegisterFly’s site on that domain. So I log in and to my surprise, there is no such code. In fact, according to the site, no such transfer was initiated.

This is where the problems really start to begin. I immediately try to get on the phone with them. I was sorely unsuccessful in doing so. Practically every number I called (including Google Address look ups and WHOIS lookups) had either been disconnected, was busy, or the automated message would just go in an infinite loop. I never did actually get through to someone. Good job, RegisterFly. All totaled, I was on hold for 7 hours, my domains hadn’t been fixed, and I was out of $12.99 for which I never received a service in return.

I then decided to call eNom as I had registered most of my domains while RegisterFly was still a reseller. I explained my situation to them and they definitely knew about what was going on To my luck, after sending them a copy of my photo ID, I was able to get these domain names pushed to an eNom account and those that needed to be re-registered.

I’ve given up completely on calling RegisterFly to get my money back. At this point, I’ve filed a complaint with PayPal. If it cannot be taken care of through that medium, I will definitely be on the phone with the Police Department in West Orange, NJ (where they are headquarted). I know, it’s only $13, but it’s the principal of the matter. Don’t mess with me. I’ll win.

All in all, my time with RegisterFly was extremely satisfactory up until this whole thing. I do indeed feel sorry for the company and that it had to come to this and that they let it come to this. They were one of the best, now they’ll go down in history as an example of what not to do as a registrar.

UPDATE: It seems PayPal has taken the initiative and gone ahead and refunded my account without question. I’m sure I’m not the first and that they’ve had thousands of these already. Kudos to PayPal.

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