I really didn’t want to write this article.  I loathe confrontation and am not the demanding type who complains in restaurants about the service or makes a big fuss. I am the type who will quietly mutter under my breath, say nothing and carry on my way. And this is really my attitude on all online services as well, whether it be Ebay, Gmail…whatever.  I always expect the occasional hitch and hoops to jump through and am not the type to make a big deal over smallish problems, which tend to resolve themselves anyway.  But I do have a lot of online businesses and I do need to register domains on a regular basis.  Not just for myself, but also for my clients. So it is an area of service that impacts my livelihood.

The reason why I have always been with Registerfly.com is because they were cheap.  During their “promos”, one can get .com domains for $6.99, .net domains for $2.95 and .info domains for under a dollar.  And one can renew or transfer domains from other registrars for as little as $4.00. For the last two years or so, I have been happy enough with the service- overall.  A few things haven’t gone well, for example – they don’t send you an email notification to tell you if one of your domains are expiring with a 30-day notice, as most registrars do. So I did get a shock a couple of times when logging into my account only to see that some domains had been dropped because I had forgotten to renew them.  Also their DNS pointing and URL forwarding service is cumbersome and “hit-and-miss” at best.  But as I said, I’m not the type who complains much and I prefer to stay “with the devil you know”. This, until recently….. 

Registerfly’s main site has recently undergone an overhaul in its design and functionality.  I am guessing that this was to improve things, but this is certainly not the case.  What was before a simple and quick checkout process is now long and tedious. One has to “un-tick” so many boxes and extra products they are trying to fob off on you, that the registration process seems to take an eternity.  Another reason why I had previously joined Registerfly is that one can pay at the checkout or fund one’s account via PayPal. This is no longer the case and they have been saying now for over a year that it is just a temporary glitch, but I have a feeling that this is not true and that PayPal will never be an option again. 

During the last two or three weeks, since the overhaul of the site, I have been unable to register one single domain name automatically from the checkout process. You would think that a registrar, whose income depends on people registering domains, might be concerned that their customers cannot register domains!  Seemingly, this is not the case. Then, at the beginning of May, because I like to consolidate all my domains under a single account, I initiated a series of domain transfers from other registrars to Registerfly.  One of these domains happens to be extremely valuable and was for a site that appears at the top of Google in its niche market, with a high page ranking. 

This domain was originally at Enom which, interestingly, is the parent company of Registerfly; i.e. Registerfly is in fact one huge reseller for Enom.  On May 16^th, some two weeks after I had initiated the transfer and received no news from Registerfly, the status of the transfer was, and I quote: “ Losing Approval.Transfer Voided”. However, in my Enom account, the domain was already showing as gone – or transferred out.  And when one searches in “who is”, one can see that the domain is indeed with Registerfly.  As I write this, on June 7^th, some 5 weeks after I initiated this transfer, I still do not have control or access to this very valuable domain name.  I am unable to change the server settings, which I need to do, or do anything else with this domain- as it is not in my account at any registrar. 

There are also three other transfers that I initiated at the same time, including from NameCheap and GoDaddy.  These were also “voided”, although the situation with these is not so serious as they remain at their original registrars in my accounts.  But for these voided transfers, I received no notifications by email from Registerfly and no refunds on my account.  Finally, as a third problem with Registerfly, I have had multiple billing on my credit card.  When one funds a credit card at Registerfly, the minimum is $25.  In my last credit card statement, I had the same $25 billed to me from the same day, three times over in error!

To summarize the above, Registerfly cannot register domain names for me,  have lost a very valuable domain name that I was trying to transfer to them, have not refunded what I am due, and have over-billed my credit card on more than one occasion.  All of this could be made fine if one had somebody at Registerfly in terms of Customer Support, to talk to about it, and to help me resolve it or reassure me. On many occasions, I have tried to call the customer helpline in the United States.  This is not a toll free number and one pays the usual international rate, as I am outside the US. I have waited hours and hours as “first in line” whether it be for Technical, Billing, or General customer support.  I have NEVER been able to get through to their customer support helpline.   

The “Live Chat” available on the website is very rarely online.  I would say out of 24 hours, you would be lucky to see it online for one single hour.  Eventually, when I did manage to find somebody on “Live Chat” from Registerfly, the representative could hardly speak a word of English.  And I don’t mean bad or pigeon English – I mean practically no English. I really think that my four-year-old daughter can spell better.  For every question I asked, it would take (and I am not exaggerating) about half an hour to get a response.  And when the response did come, it would be something so nonsensical and irrelevant that it makes one want to go outside and bang your head against a wall. 

So after hours of this back and forth, the Live Chat representative told me to “rays a tikit” (raise a ticket with customer support), which of course I had done weeks ago.  So what of the support ticket process at Registerfly? Well, firstly you don’t get a response for days and days in spite of being assured that all tickets will be responded to within 2-3 hours or at the latest 24 hours.  Secondly, you don’t get an email to let you know your ticket’s been responded to, so you constantly need to login to your account to check.  When you do login and find a response, I was amazed at finding that my tickets kept on being closed!

These tickets were unilaterally closed without informing me and without responding to my questions or concerns.  For example, with my inability to register domains, one of four things would happen.  Firstly, they would simply go ahead and register the domain that I had been doing as a test to see if the registration process worked, but note – not at the promotional price, but at the full price, and they would simply deduct my account without my permission.  And this for a domain I didn’t really want and was just doing as a “test” Or the response would be written, again in poor English- “ there is no problem at Registerfly end”- so somehow suggesting that I was doing something wrong, but without helping me to solve the problem.  The third classic response, and I have had each of the three after many days of waiting, was to say “please check your “who is” information and try again. Amazingly, as a fourth, I have had one response admitting that the problem was at Registerfly’s end- but they simply say “try again in 12-24 hours”. That for nearly three weeks now. With these tickets about registrations, and my other tickets about lost domains, void transfers, no refunds and wrongful billing, I get the same type of responses  - unhelpful and unapologetic.

This experience has taught me that cheap is not always best.  Registerfly say that they are 2^nd fastest-growing registrar on the internet.  If this is true, then there must be many others like myself who have had similar experiences.  Personally, I am not prepared to give any second chances to Registerfly, and will be moving all domains I have with them to another registrar. When one thinks of the amount of time, money and effort one puts into a website, it really is very important to look after the domain properly and ensure it is in safe hands. I can categorically and truthfully state that, in my experience, the hands of Registerfly are not safe.