I’m back! After having my domain held randsom for almost a month by the crooks at Registerfly, I finally have my domain keebler.net back.

Here is what happened: I registered my domain with RegisterFly for a period of two years ending in December 2007. RegisterFly was a domain reseller for Enom and everything was fine. Unfortunately, they decided they would like to become a registrar themselves. They started transferring over all their domains from Enom to themselves. However, the transfer process was broken and failed whenever someone tried to renew a domain (or in my case, when the one-year anniversary of my registration came about).

Since RegisterFly was unable to renew the domains on their end, and Enom considered the domains expired, Enom started capturing all the traffic to the expired domains and putting up “squatter” pages i.e. pages with keywords pulled from the URL all over them.

At this point, I (more than) realized that it was time to move to another registrar. However, registrars don’t allow expired domains to be registered with another registrar for a period of 42 days without authorization sent through the email address in the WHOIS information. Registerfly uses a service called ProtectFly to mask the WHOIS information of their clients. ProtectFly translates your WHOIS email addresses to @spamfly.net email addresses and is supposed to forward all email to those addresses on to their clients. Of course, like all RegisterFly’s products, SpamFly doesn’t work. As a result, I couldn’t receive the transfer request authorization emails from other registrars and could not transfer my domain.

To make matters worse, RegisterFly essentially shut-down all Support services. I waited two hours on hold only to be disconnected, their online chat support was turned off, and they didn’t answer any support tickets I opened. Finally, after several weeks, they started closing my support tickets with responses like this one:

Hello…,

We are facing some technical problems with our renewal system.
So Please try to renew it again.

If you need any further assistance please feel free to contact us again.

Regards,

Jim Jones
Client Support Executive
Registerfly.com INC
ICANN Accredited Registrar

So keebler.net was trapped in domain-limbo for almost a month. I emailed Support every day, and tried renewing my domain every two days as Support told me to. I had to pay for the renewal twice (despite the fact that I had originally registered keebler.net until December 2007). Support will not respond to my tickets requesting those amounts back.

Finally, today, I tried a renewal (paying another $8.99) and it worked. So keebler.net is back. With the WHOIS unlocked, I’m finally in the process of moving my domains over to GoDaddy, a credible registrar. I’ve lost all traffic while my site was down, everyone dropped my RSS feed, and I’ve lost a month’s worth of email.

This same saga has happened to thousands of other people. They’ve started a community of RegisterFly customers who have been screwed also. Once, my domains are moved over to GoDaddy, I hope I never hear from those RegisterFly a55holes again. If you have your domains registered with them, I highly recommend transferring them to someone else.

Anyhow, I’m back Thanks for coming back

Registerfly Sucks