Domain Direct Gripes

Holding My Domain Hostage

November 30, 2006. I'm busy. Very much so. The last thing I want to do now is update this website. But my recent experience with Domain Direct is so bad, that I took the time to write about it here.

For many reasons (see below for some) in early November 2006, I tried to transfer registration of a dot COM domain away from Domain Direct to a registrar I have had much better experiences with.  Unfortunately, as of October 2006 this requires providing the "winning" registrar with an authorization code. Previously authorization codes were not needed for dot COM domains. 

The Domain Direct website has not been updated so it does not display the authorization code. 

I put in a tech support request on their website for them to send me the authorization code. I make this request about six times over more than two weeks. None of these requests generated a response. 

I emailed them at dnstech@domaindirect.com twice and got an auto-responder message both times so I know my requests were received. They weren't answered however, despite the auto-responder message saying they try to respond in 24 hours. They fail at this. 

For most of the month of November 2006 the domain in question was no longer transfer locked due to the pending transfer. This is a potentially dangerous situation. 

Finally, I called on the phone (866-337-8633) and after a 12 minute wait spoke to someone who said they would email me the authorization code. They did. End of story, finally. 

I was too soon. As of November 30,2006 their online web application for administering domains now displays the authorization code for .COM domains. 

 

Other Problems (spanning a couple years)

There have been too many email problems with domains under their control. Email to one of my domains was delayed in July 2006. 

I also had spam filtering problems. Their anti-spam software had more false positives than other such software I have used. 

In September 2006 they wrote to apologize about email problems. 

They are more expensive than competitors that do a better job. 

November 2006: Still more email problems, their email service is "degraded". See network status.

November 29, 2006: They experienced an "outage with our Network facility" that knocked Email and Registration Offline. 

September 22, 2006: A number of outgoing email servers were blacklisted by the SpamCOP service. Two months later this still had not been resolved. 

October 17, 2006: Quoting the network status: "Customers may see intermittent delays for mail delivery during peak load times." Over a month later, this was still ongoing. 

November 16th 2006: Quoting the network status: "Customers may see errors logging into the system through POP/IMAP. These errors are only intermittent and will state that the login or password is wrong."  This was resolved two weeks later. 

They are very slow responding to emailed questions. 

Their online web application for administering domains has a "log off" link that doesn't work in Firefox. It's a JavaScript command to close the current window. Last verified November 30, 2006. 

December 15, 2004: Email forwarded for a domain of mine stopped working.

December 13, 2004: Out of the blue they sent me the message below for a domain other than the one above that had problems two days later. Different issues.

WARNING: Your email accounts WILL BE DELETED in the next 48 hours. At that time your Domain Direct email services will no longer function. To prevent this from happening change your mail exchanges (MX records) back to the Domain Direct settings. To change your MX Records to the Domain Direct settings, add the following settings to your zone file through your DNS provider:
   MX inbound.mydomainname.org.emailmx.com
  CNAME MAIL mail.mydomainname.org.emailmx.com
  CNAME SMTP smtp.mydomainname.org.emailmx.com

August 15, 2004. Out of the blue, one of the email addresses associate with a domain for which Domain Direct does the email stopped working. They had changed the format of the userid for retrieving email. For an email address of me@mydomain.com, the userid for retrieving email used to be "me". Now it is "me@mydomain.com". I had to call them on the phone to figure this out. If they told me about it ahead of time, I missed it. They may have sent a note to the email address about this, but the person using it has no computer experience at all and would not have understood it.  

Problems Registering a New Domain

January 19, 2002. I try to sign up for a new domain but can't. The error message is shown below. I checked the card number and the expiration date. They were fine. I re-tried the request, hoping it was a fluke, but got the same error.

January 20, 2002.  I called my credit card company to see if the account was okay. It was. They had two authorizations pending, meaning that Domain Direct did contact my credit card company and put through a pending transaction. In other words, the error message is wrong. None of the three problems that it suggests were, in fact, my problem. 

The credit card company gave me the phone number for Domain Direct and I called it - but it was Sunday and they are not open on weekends. 

January 21, 2002. I called Domain Direct and they said the two pending authorizations on my credit card would expire and not result in actual charges. As for the underlying problem, they guessed it was something to do with "the" gateway over the weekend. 

Later in the day, I tried to sign up again. Exact same error. Another phone call to Domain Direct (fortunately they have an 800 number). 

The support person had an error code for my just-failed transaction, but that was not sufficient to pinpoint the exact problem. He did have some educated guesses though. A couple months ago, I had purchased another domain (without incident) from Domain Direct. This oft-failing transaction was using the same credit card as the prior one (but a new userid). It was suggested that perhaps the system was failing because of changes in the information I supplied. That is, he thought the system was matching up the new transaction with the old one based on the credit card number and failing due to some changes.  

The credit card information was exactly the same, or so I thought. The support person noticed that a couple months ago I had entered "ny" as my billing address city. This time I had entered "new york". Also, the last time, the organization name was different. Considering these are two different domains that would be normal, but he suggested I change it to be the exact same organization I had used a couple months ago. Finally, he noticed that he phone number for the organization owning the domain was different. Again, this would be normal with different domains, but it was suggested this might be a problem. 

The support person was sympathetic, no doubt this causes them more grief than it caused me. He explained that these checks are designed to prevent fraud and are necessary when accepting credit cards on the Internet. 

I tried again to purchase the domain using the same organization name, organization phone number and billing city as I had a couple months ago, when I purchased the first domain. It worked. The support person could not narrow down which of the three items was the problem, in fact he said, it might have been the combination of all three. 

FYI

As of January 2002, Domain direct charges $40 for one year and $70 for two years of domain ownership. Included in this price is one POP3 email account and five forwarded email addresses. The forwarded email addresses were the main reason I chose to register domains with them.

I've had equally bad gripes with other registrars, register.com and Network Solutions.