OzWebMasters

I published a post back in January about how inept I thought RegisterFly were, and now they have been de-accredited by ICANN.

I’ve only just read the full story at Wikipedia. Seems this 10-year-old business, with 2 million registered domains, was run by a pair of gay lovers who recently broke up, accusing each other spending business proceeds on things like male prostitutes, liposuction, a penthouse apartment in Florida, and a $6,000 chihuahua dog. Now it is starting to make sense!

Even though the site has been de-accredited, and a court has ordered them to stop mentioning that they are accredited, the site has not changed, and appears to be still taking orders for domain names.

Supposedly ICANN will transfer all the domain names to another registrar arounf Mar 31st. Hopefully it won’t be too painful for their million customers

I’ve tried quite a few cheap domain registrars, and my ultimate opinion is that whereas GoDaddy is exceptional, RegisterFly is hoplessly bad. Like a bad restaurant at a tourist destination, they seem to rely on the attraction of low prices, and don’t care about repeat customers.

I’m sure I could list dozens of faults, but here’s two:

1) When you transfer a domain to another registrar, it still remains in your account, and you get renewal reminders. The only way around this is to contact support and ask then to remove it. It’s not like they can gain any extra business from this, it’s just inept and annoying.

2) When you try to renew a domain, you get an email like this:

STANDARDIZED FORM OF AUTHORIZATION
DOMAIN NAME TRANSFER - Confirmation of Registrar Transfer Request

Attention: Robert Skelton
Re: Transfer of *********.com

Registerfly.com received notification on Jan  1 2007 12:00AM (EST) that
you have requested a transfer to another domain name registrar.  If you
want to proceed with this transfer, you do not need to respond to this
message.  If you wish to either cancel or expedite the transfer, please
respond to this message before Jan  6 2007 12:00AM (EST) by using the
following URL:

How bad is that? GoDaddy takes a few minutes to renew a domain. RegisterFly takes 3 days and throws in a bonus massively misleading & confusing email!

I was at the SES site, working out the best sessions for my US colleagues to visit in Chicago next month, and I saw that one of the exhibitors is Moniker, who I had previously not heard of. It says:

Moniker.com is one of the Top 3 Fastest Growing ICANN Accredited Registrars, offering domain registration, domain name sales and escrow, website hosting and website management services for individuals and businesses. Our emphasis is on providing the very best levels of customer service, the highest levels of security, at the best price.

So I visit their site and find that:

• At $18.99 it’s not a “best price”
• “Security” seems to consist of masking WHOIS info, which GoDaddy does much cheaper, and all major registrars offer anyway
• They can’t spell! It says on their home page, albeit seemingly temporarily, “Due to technical difficulties at the registry, registration of Crountry Code TLD domains is not currently available”

I can’t vouch for their customer service, but they do not appear to be better than GoDaddy in any way, let alone price

Plans to fast-track the introduction of non-English characters in website domain names could “break the whole internet”, warns ICANN chief executive [Australian born] Paul Twomey.

Although it is reasonable for non-English speaking cultures to want to have domain names in their own language, it could be disastrous. Too many characters look the same, and fake sites would abound. Currently there are 37 characters that are allowed to be used in domain names, but this number could rise to over 50,000 if non-English letters are allowed.

My suggested solution: non-English domain names should be categorised as such in the DNS, and browsers should show a little flag to indicate when you have visited a site using non-English characters. A similar solution for links in emails, and email reply-to addresses might be harder to implement…

Their newsletter says: “After extensive consideration, we have decided to no longer accept domain names that promote hate, sex, obscenity or self-destructive behavior, such as substance abuse, violence and gambling. The sole rationale behind our decision is to make Afternic a more comfortable site for mainstream domain name shoppers, especially small business owners.”

Day by day, the web is becoming a nicer, friendlier, safer, less litigious place. All news like this is welcomed. The darker side will always exist, but will just be less obvious to the casual surfer.

Catch #1 is that you don’t own it. Catch #2 is that it is only for email, although hosting may come later. Even so, it’s a bold idea - AOL will register a domain name for you, effectively giving you a personalized domain name for your correspondence that is much more business-like than gmail, hotmail etc. More at AOL

It went to auction recently, but there were no takers. Once upon a time the reserve was $US8 million, this time $US1 million. I guess it’s hard to think of what it would be used for, and how you’d ever make enough from the moniker to pay for it. But it is definitely a memorable name!

Perhaps a portal for teenagers & goths, a cross between a clothes store, iTunes and YouTube?