Bad Companies - RegisterFly

Note: I am not speaking on behalf of anybody but me. *I* am ticked off; I don't know if anybody else is.

The short version: I have been screwed by RegisterFly (also known as unifiednames.com) twice, once when they lost my registration for killfile.org for over a week, and once when they *entirely* lost mod.org. Their tech support is obtuse at best and unusable in reality, and their customer service may as well not exist; all that I can say positively about them is that their billing system works as promised, though it may as well not be connected to the rest of the company. They should be avoided.

The long version:

May 2002

While I don't really have time to write up the whole thing right now, the short of it: my domain (killfile.org) was lost because RegisterFly, then my domain registrar, forgot to pay their upstream site. I was unable to complain except over a chat system, and the domain was down for over a week, causing mail bouncings and various other related problems. This has been only significant outage in several years of running the domain, so I was understandably touchy. I eventually solved the problem by re-buying my own domain name from their upstream vendor, Enom, who was more expensive but *much* more professional and worked out my problems within an hour.

April 2003

In April 2003, I decided it was about time to renew skirvin.net and mod.org, two personal domain names. Because I was running late I decided to not bother transferring the domains to another registrar yet; I didn't want to worry about the hassle or danger of the transfers, and I was willing to give RegisterFly one more shot. This was, of course, foolish.

There's not really too many details to offer here. Somehow or other, they managed to lose mod.org entirely - nobody has told me why. It now belongs to another registrar, and not me. In the mean time, they had kept on billing me for it, including billing me *twice* for this last time when I attempted to renew it. I was able to get back this money, but not the earlier payments, and I never did get the domain back...

skirvin.net is, unfortunately, still hosted at registerfly. I hope to fix this shortly, but I've paid up until the end of the year, and it's not strictly vital...

Postscript, October 2004

Over the last 18 months, I have gotten many people mailing me about this page and asking for additional information. All I can really say is that I currently use Enom and DirectNIC for my domain registration needs, and have been quite happy with both of them.

Post-Postscript, February 2006

It's worth noting that RegisterFly is the same company as Unified Names (http://www.unifiednames.com/). Don't use them either.

External Complaints

Over the past several years, I have gotten many further complaints about the Registerfly scam mailed to me from various diverse sources. I've decided to at least attempt to gather some of these complaints together.