I’ve been in the business of doing websites since 1998. Little did I know that no one would protect a Registrant if your domain registrar is a fraud or if they decide to take your domain hostage. Whoa?! Such huge allegations you say? We will get to that. You’d want to hear this story.

The big question – -

If you are reading this blog post, I’m 100% sure you own a domain or two yourselves or know of someone who does. Can you trust your registrar? I found out the hard way that you couldn’t. I am one of those victimized by RegisterFly. Charles Ferri’s video shows it all. The Malaysia Sun has a full story on the scandal. Bob Parson, CEO of GoDaddy, has a blog post about this RegistryFly Scandal too.

Based on my experience from this, there’s no clear lawful process to immediately “siege” back a domain you own when your Registrar has your domain in its clutches and NO ONE seems to know how to exactly fix this kind of problem other than ICANN’s sending breach of contract memos and then maybe finally canceling the registrar’s accreditation.

What about the stolen domains? What about the time sites becoming inoperable because of this scandal and it’s disruption to business? How is that addressed/resolved? Rumors have it that ICANN will migrate those customers to another registrar soon. I’ve emailed ICANN and InterNic, and yet, I have not heard nor receive any email from them to address my problem. I am but one of the thousands banging their head on the wall and feeling just helpless. People are already losing business over this and now they even have to pay to transfer out? Plainly, ridiculous.

I have learned some things from this misfortune and I’d like to share them with you. Please read below:

Steps you can do to protect your domain – -

1. Obviously, watch out for red flags: renewals not going through but billed for it, support tickets being deleted or left unanswered for days, domain names magically disappearing from your domain management panel, calling customer support and placed on hold for 45 mins only to be forwarded to a 411 directory operator. Yes, seriously that bad! The moment you start seeing that transfer out!
2. Regularly check the WhoIs information of your domain.
3. I cannot emphasize more that it’s very important to have your Administrative Contact Email current! In the event you transfer your domain, an email will be sent out to the administrative contact email to confirm and authorize the process. Don’t worry, it’ll be less tedious to update the contact info using bulk edit if you own more than one domain.
4. Keep a copy of your Authorization Code. This information can be found in your domain management panel under your whois info. The authorization code is your key out if you decide to transfer your domain to a different registrar.
5. Regularly check the Registrar Status of your domain. The status info can also be seen on WhoIs.
6. In situations like the RegisterFly fiasco, it’s better not to dispute the charges on your credit card for payments for domain renewals. Keep them as your proof.

To this date, I still have 12 pending transfers, some renewed domains that still expired and moved out of my control panel so I have no access to the authorization codes. Those domains are now sitting under RegisterFly’s parking pages. Is there hope?

This blog entry was posted on Monday, February 26th, 2007 at 10:04 pm and is filed under Business, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.