I registered two domains through register.com for personal use, and at the start I was very happy. The automated registration system worked well, and a few hours after I registered I had working domains. It was so easy! (This from someone who has spent time poking through Bind config files, and knows how bad it can get.)

Changes to my configuration were easy as well. IP change? No problem. New host? No problem. All these were accomplished through simple forms on their website.

After about seven months, I started to think about renewing the domains. After all, things were working out well. This is when the trouble started.

I filled out their form for domain renewal-- shooting for the full nine-year period. (Hey, I don't want to have to worry about renewals any more...) None of my contact or credit card information had changed, yet they refused to charge my card because of "fraud protection". Wierd.

I followed their suggestion to have customer service manually renew my domains, and filled out their customer service form. A day later a "how are we doing" survey form arrived, which was odd since they hadn't replied yet. I filled this out with the comment that I hadn't heard from them, but it had only been a day.

Four weeks passed, and I never heard from them. I re-submitted my renewal, this time trying several different credit cards. None worked, so I opened up another customer service ticket. I got the same "how are we doing" survey, and commented on this that I had never heard back from the previous submission.

Four weeks passed, and I never heard from them. I looked around their website for a call-in number, but none was to be found. This is when I really started to worry... I put in yet another customer service request, this one worded rather strongly that I was upset that I had never heard back from them. In the "how are we doing" survey I replied rather nastily that I was feeling completely ignored and that if I didn't get these renewed I was going to transfer them to another registrar.

About this same time, my credit card bill arrives. I was charged for a domain renewal. Great! I think, they got one of my messages! A quick "whois" check showed my expiration dates unchanged. *sigh*

Still holding out some hope that they would contact me, I waited a few weeks.

This brings us to the present. I just submitted my last customer service request, and I expect that since I have no way to contact these bozos I'll have to dispute the charge on my credit card. This will only make them more concerned about "credit fraud" when in fact it's likely their complete lack of customer service is to blame for disputed charges like this.

I will be transferring my domains to someone else, possibly dotster, who was highly recommended by epinions.

Avoid this registrar at all costs.

----- Long Overdue Update, Nov 2002 -----

I transferred my domains to Dotster and the registration completed without a hitch. The only problem is Dotster is just a registrar-- they do not have any DNS servers for people to use (well, not on my $0 budget, anyhow.) This means that none of your domains will actually resolve to anything useful until you find someone to host your DNS.

Fortunately, I found ZoneEdit (http://www.zoneedit.com) which has free DNS hosting for low-traffic sites and inexpensive hosting for high-traffic sites. This provides a web interface for adding/changing hosts much like the one at register.com.


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