I’ve been using a nice low-cost registrar for many years now, mydomain.com (actually I started with dotregistrar which was later acquired by mydomain.)
I’ve stayed with them because:
-they gave me a special price, since I have so many domains
-they offer free dns
-they offer free anonymous whois services
With the quantity of names I keep, all these little savings add up and help with ownership costs a lot.
Beginning last year though, problems started.
-a DDOS took out their dns for over a whole day (not really their fault, sicne they were attacked)
-I began to notice that any time I make a dns change, it would not get updated. I’d have to open a ticket, be reassured it takes time to update, inform them that it’s not working and it’s been several days, get the silent treatment, call them, get escalated to next tier support, and finally find someone to help. This gets tiring as one might imagine.
I kept asking when these DNS issues would be resolved, and I ware reassured that they are moving to a new platform, and once migrated everything will be great.
Well, that finally happened a few weeks back. It was not great. At all.
-about 75% of my dns settings got lost. So, most of my production websites suddenly became parking pages. Business emails stopped working. Hell broke lose. I called and tried to get help with this, and was told sorry it would take several days. So instead, I got to spend a day and a half manually updating dns settings to get sites and email back online. Inexcuseable.
-I apparently no longer get free anonymity on my domains. It’s ok to change pricing, but give me a heads up? I’ll move my names somewhere else before spending 9 bucks a year to add this service. I’ve requested changing this back to free, but all I get are “we’ll have to check with billing about this”. All stalling, no answers.
-I’ve had a support ticket open about this for WEEKS now. I get partial answers sometimes, but nothing that actually resolves anything. This is big. Support has never been this company’s strong suite, but it has become ridiculous now.
-I will sometimes not renew a name before it expires (I’m busy), but that is ok because they have a grace period. Well now it looks like if I let a name expire, the dns gets reset after a few days. This is a horrible practice. I have a grace period for a reason, disrupting my properties in this way is unacceptable. I’m not even sure this is legal.
-When I try to renew a longish list of names, the system bogs out and crashes. It appears to put all the names in the querystring, and appears to get too long for the browser to handle. So then you get to go back and try selecting a smaller list and try again.
-And of course the small things – Like, when checking out my names, I can’t set a renewal period for the whole batch. No, I have to go through the whole list, often hundreds at a time, and select 1 year, 2 year, etc. I just want to set all to 1 year, like the old system did. Same thing for selecting whether you want anonymity or not- go through the entire list one by one.
-Just now, after doing this for only 70ish names (so it wouldnt blow up), I finally hit the button to renew them. “Your transaction has been suspended for security purposes”. Great. Now I get to wait on the phone for a hour. (I waited for an hour and nobody ever answered. This was last week, so I’m still out of luck.)
-Performance is now bad in may spots. Go try to edit settings on a single domain, and you get the ajax spinner for far longer than should be needed. Do this for 50 names and you should plan to spend all day.
I have another registrar I’ve been trying that has treated me well and I will be moving all my names to them as soon as time allows. It’s so unfortunate after owning thousands of domain names and spending over a decade with mydomain (and dotregistrar) things have turned out this way.
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Update- I’ve been spending weeks trying to get issues resolved with renewals (since I’m stuck renewing domains until I can move them off). Online support is worthless, and phone support won’t answer. Initially I tried renewing a larger batch of names, which claimed it needed to be reviewed by billing before it could be approved. In the interim, I found I could do renewals one at a time… try doing that with hundreds!
Well sure enough, over a week later, a big batch of renewals came through. Except these weren’t the ones I initially tried to renew- the list includes names I’d decided to let expire. Oh, and now a bunch of names have auto-renew turned on, which I didn’t do. I update my ticket once more and actually get a reply- “please send us the list of domains you are having issues with”. Um, at this point, pretty much all of them? Just another stall tactic from support that is either unempowered or just doesn’t care.
Also I kept asking (for weeks) about setting my domain anonymity back to free (instead of 8.99/year) and I got an update on a ticket that this had finally been done. But, go to renew more and what do you know- still shows 8.99.
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Another update: so mydomain apparently decided to set all my domains to auto renew. I didn’t ask for this, and as a result a bunch of names I wished to let expire are now getting auto renewed. At this point though, it’s worth it to let the names get auto renewed and get a few extras in there just so I don’t have to mess with the horrible slow crashy process required to manually renew.
Except that today, I noticed a few names were not showing the correct page. Log into mydomain, and sure enough – probably 80% of them were being auto renewed, but somehow a batch of about 15, although set to autorenew=true, had expired. And just as before, one day after expiration the dns settings get screwed up.
Back to manually renewing these. Just tried a small batch of 20 and the site crashed on my twice while trying to renew. I can’t even make up a user experience this bad.
The saga continues…