Josh Nichols

My domain is safe!

If you didn’t already know, Registerfly is a sinking ship and if they are hosting any of your domains, you better get them out pronto. All the juicy details of sabotage and scandal can be found at Registerflies.com.

I feel bad about it too. I recommended Registerfly to several of my friends and their domains are now stuck in limbo about to expire. Since Registerfly wasn’t putting anything on their site about this situation, I would have been totally oblivious to all this if I hadn’t come across Todd Dominey’s post on the subject. He managed to escape the disaster, but I was too late. My own 2 domains were trapped, until today. I was able to transfer the important one out — joshnichols.com. The other one is still stuck, but I’m not concerned about it.

Joshnichols.com had the whois protection, Protectfly, turned on and I couldn’t turn it off so I could access my authorization code for transfer. This domain showed Registerfly as the domain’s registrar in the whois lookup. Nothing I did in the control panel would work. I would just get strange errors and Registerfly support was totally useless. I spent a month sending support tickets, sending emails and making phone calls with no answer whatsoever. I only had a few weeks until my domain would expire and I was getting stressed out about it.

After reading some of the comments on Registerflies.com, I found a suggestion that ended up working for me. Someone managed to crate a new Registerfly account and transfer ownership of his domains from the ‘stuck’ account to the new one. Once moved to the new account, the domains had Protectfly gone and authorization codes appeared. I decided to try it since I had nothing to lose and it worked. I got my authorization code and got the hell out!

For some reason, I was able to turn Protectfly off on the other domain, but the authorization code was left blank and I was unable to modify my contact info. This domain had Enom, a reseller for Registerfly before they became accredited by ICANN, as the registrar in the whois lookup. This might be why this domain acted differently. I contacted Enom about my situation and their solution was for me to create an account on their site and fax my I.D. to them to prove I’m the owner of my domain. Then they would transfer my domain. What a hassle! I’m not that interested in this other domain, so I think I’ll just let it expire.

Now I need to work on getting Natalie’s domains out too and see if this trick helps my friends with stuck domains get them set free.