ItsFinallyMyDomain.com
This is the last chapter in the nine-month-long saga of ItsYourDomain and its holding of my domain name. As of yesterday, it has finally been transferred to GoDaddy.com. Huge, huge sigh of relief.
I urge anyone who is similarly stuck at IYD and is desperately trying to transfer out to contact Nick Starai. As a long-time technical manager, I have the experience to say that Nick may not have the best customer service skills and needs to learn how to smooth out situations with highly dissatisfied customers, especially with very technical and vocal ones who have been harassed by businesses affiliated with IYD, but he got the job done in the end. He believes in ItsYourDomain, despite its proven monopolistic and predatory policies. I’ll give him a generous B-.
In summary, my beefs with IYD remain: I don’t care if the ghost of Abraham Lincoln rises from his grave and produces notarized sworn testimony from George Washington that states that ItsYourDomain sends timely renewal notices — I will never believe it. In my experience, I read 100% of my emails, none are filtered by any spam software, I have gotten dozens of notifications from GoDaddy and Network Solutions, and have received absolutely zero notifications from either IYD or its affiliate, DomainsStuffEtc.com. My ISP doesn’t filter out spam, my mail server doesn’t filter out spam, and my desktop software doesn’t filter out spam. If I didn’t receive any of the six emails that were supposedly sent, then they just frankly were not sent. Without sending out those emails, ItsYourDomain and its resellers justify such arcane policies as putting domains on hold five days BEFORE expiration, and charging $100 to restore those immorally pre-expired domains.
I will not quote the last communication from Nick in its entirety, because it wouldn’t be fair to him as it wouldn’t reflect well upon the fact that he was eventually able to solve my problem. However, I will excerpt the last paragraph: “I suppose this has gotten out of hand, but I simply was trying to see if I could help you with any outstanding concerns. It is more than obvious that you are not looking for anything other then ammunition.” Nick, this isn’t about you. It’s about ItsYourDomain, and the fact that my domain was held hostage for far too long. Imagine if your car was towed out of your own driveway without your permission by a rogue towing company looking to line its pockets. Wouldn’t you do whatever it takes to get it back? Of course! I will use whatever ammunition I have at my disposal.
One final note: on a thread at webhostingtalk.com, Nick stated, “We (IYD) choose to put a domain on ‘Registrar-Hold’ status after it expires. Again, this is not an automatic process, and we must explicitly set this status. It is also possible to have both Registrar-HOLD and Registrar-LOCK; but this is quite redundant. Customers often have invalid email addresses on record, and do not always receieve their renewal notices. We use Registrar-hold on expiration day 0 to help alert the customers by removing their domain from the Registry zonefiles. After noticing their site or email disappear (unfortunately) they usually are happy to hear we saved their domain from being deleted and going into RedemptioStatus.”
(1) Customers are NOT happy about this.
(2) Rely on the United States Postal Service.
[Interestingly, I received four more automated emails from GoDaddy in the time it took me to write this, all notifying me of pending domain renewal dates.]
