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Network Solutions Dirty Tactics
Network Solutions/Verisign have done it again. I thought one week was enough time to transfer a domain to a new registrar as is my practice with every domain I have that comes up for renewal with NetShits. At least 5 others have transferred smoothly in a few days with no glitches. This time, I suspect they figured they were jerk me around until the domain became expired and therefore the only recourse I would have is to renew with NetShits. That seems to be their tactic for keeping customers.
Here is roughly how things went:
- Feb 18th, 9:31am - I initiated a transfer of the domain on another registrars site. Similar process I've done a few times before.
- Feb 18th, 10:02am - Confirmed the transfer from the new registrar by an email they send out.
- Feb 18th, 11:06am - Transfer request sent from the new registrar to Network Solutions.
- Feb 21st, 10:14am - Phone call to Network Solutions. This rep. said that he did not have any evidence that Network Solutions received a transfer request from the new registrar and suggested that I contact them to have them send it again.
- Feb 21st, 1:44pm - Phone call to Network Solutions again after discussing with the new registrar (the new registrar said that they cannot send another transfer as they have not receive a cancel or expire event from Network Solutions and were able to give me the details on when various events happened (that is where the first 3 items on this list came from). This time NetShits admits that they did receive a transfer request and supposedly sent out a transfer request to my email on Feb 19th. Don't know why their great automated system takes 24 hours to send out an email but I'm sure its part of their delay tactics. All the rep. could do according to him was to trigger the system to send out another transfer. He said however that it could take up to 24hrs for it to get to me. So suggested I wait 24hrs before calling back.
- Feb 22nd, 7:22pm - Phone call to NetShits once again since I did not receive the transfer request. The rep. says he can escalate this so that someone will manually get the transfer to happen immediately. However, their system is conveniently down at the moment so he will have to escalate this in an hour when the system is back online. The suggestion was to wait the hour or 24hrs (not sure why I would have to wait 24hrs if it was going to be done manually right away).
- Feb 23rd, approx 2:15pm - Phone call to NetShits once again. I didn't want to waste much time with the first rep. on the phone but did argue with this person for about 20 minutes since they said now that the domain is officially expired that they can not transfer it. He said even if they re-trigger the transfer request and I actually get the email to respond to it will eventually be rejected as a transfer cannot take place when the domain is expired. Conveniently though, one can easily renew the domain during this period. After getting a supervisor on the phone he basically just told me the same total bullshit. He said I had 2 options. One was to renew the domain with NetShits and then do the transfer (like that does me any good). The second was to let the domain be released into the available pool and re-register it with the new registrar. Once again a ridiculous option which I told him so about 5 times during the rest of the conversation. He also said that by the rules of icann.org (and supposedly in their policy statement - which I haven't checked yet), domain transfers can only be guaranteed if they are requested earlier than 30 days before expiration. He also said that since the domain is expired he could not do anything about it. Of course I challenged him on both of those and made him feel completely ridiculous and powerless.
- Feb 23, 2:43pm - Received an email from NetShits with the subject "Change of Registrar - Request to Change Not Confirmed/Denied". I didn't notice this come in while I was actually on the phone with the 2 morons described in the previous entry. Apparently their system can send emails out to me no problem when it is convenient to them.
- Feb 23, 3:11pm - Email confirmation from NetShits that my renewal is successful. I had to give in and renew with NetShits online. Once again, when they are collecting money from people their system can very easily reach me by email.
Its amazing the kind of stuff these guys are getting away with. I suspect they won't be in business much longer. Just found some stats at http://www.icann.org/tlds/monthly-reports/.
The following are total domains registered at Network Solutions:
- Oct 2001 - 14,714,361
- Aug 2002 - 9,186,457
- Sep 2002 - 9,043,790
- Oct 2002 - 8,887,839
Hopefully they will keep this trend going and will be out of business sooner than I thought!!
I'm obviously not alone in this. See http://www.verisignoff.com/.
Brent was right, don't wait till domain is near renewal (which has worked fine for me up till now), just transfer no matter how much time is left. All my other domains will now be transferred immediately and I'll be Verisign/Network Solutions free.
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