hi guys...

i recently got somewhat tired with onlinenic. (yea, i know, the earth quake in china and all, lets just say i was ready to quit anyways.)

I have a couple dozen domains with them.
2 q's:

- It just occured to me that i never attempted to transfer any domain away from them and was wondering if anyone has experienced any surprizes he might like to share here while doing that.

- Any recommendations on -reliable-full featured-low cost registrars these days?
Didn't really look into this for a few years so i s'pose it's a good idea to ask.

thanks a lot ...
cheers
d

two of my friend using onlinenic from many years even my country's biggest hosting company is onlinenic reseller. I not think they are horrible like you think. (I personaly not have any experience with them)

I am fan of dotregistrar and with them from 6 years. Almost all fine with them.

These forums are littered with recommendations. Have you done a search? What is it you expect from a registrar?

I not think they are horrible like you think.
Actually, I did not say they were horrible.
Is rather a personal hunch of mine that it's about time to move on.

(I personaly not have any experience with them)
Their domain adminstration is a scary mess since way over a month.
Im a atient guy, perhaps too patient sometimes. But at the moment I couldn't call them recommendable.

Actually, what i would like to know was if anyone here has gone through any major dramas while moving domains away from them. And whether things worked out in the end and how.


These forums are littered with recommendations. Have you done a search?

Yes, I've been googling around and read the first three pages of this forum.
Thing is, it's actually the fist time in ~4 years or so I'm doing this.
Guess the landscape has changed quite a bit. :)

What is it you expect from a registrar?

Hm, what does one expect....
I'd expect my domains to be in a safe place. As for extras, I'd need full DNS control, autorenewable, option for privacy protection *option*(turn on/off).
I certainly wouldn't mind to stick with a price similar to that of Onlinenic.
But I guess I'd like to have at least a working panel.

I feel that I don't really got me a good overview yet.
Many of these site look pretty fishy to me, actually, also those of better known companies. It gotten harder to find sites that only do domains and don't try to sell you walkman at the side. I find that repulsive as a domain buyer. If, for example, i wouldn't *know* that godaddy works pretty well, I would *never* trust them as for their outfit.

Is there a like a link to comparisons somewhere ? (most to avoid, most secure, most stable, silliest etc?).

- I don't fancy Godaddy's 'look and feel' too much, and I can't say I like their internal rules.
-SRS looked pretty good to me. (Is this Networksolutions competing with themselves ?)
-Ipower had a very low price (Is this Tucows competing with themselves ? Why aren't there any prices at the Tucows site ?) I didn t see ipower commented upon too much in this forums. What are peoples views about them ?

I've noticed that some registrars take quite some time to respond to e-mails even on 'presales' level. I mailed 1&1 four days ago, for example, and didn't even get an autoreply. I keep wondering why they're so successful. Same goes for godaddy as well, actually.

So, fill me in if you will, what else did I miss ? :)

You can use directi (resellerclub) www.resellerclub.com
Their pricing is similar to onlinenic, they charge a little bit additional fee for Domain and Email forwarding, but their Whois protection service is free.
Panel is great and works fine, if they plan any maintenance, they would announce it before they do it.
They're an indian registrar and East asia earth quake didn't have any effect on them.
I don't have experience of bluk transfering away from onlinenic, but I'm sure resellerclub and onlinenic, both will help you in this.

look i am one of onlineNIC.com and i have more than 100 domain and i am facing the same problem with them but i can't leave them they have good prices and also great support so we have to give them some more time to fix their servers

I think you'd do quite well with a Namecheap account, from what you've said. They're a major eNom reseller with their own control panel. Basic registration is $8.88 but there is always a coupon to reduce that to by $0.90. Their control panel is quite good. They use eNom's DNS. their have the most flexible privacy out there. $2.88 but cheaper in bulk. You can switch it between domains (unlike most registrars). So for less than $11 you can get the full works including flexible privacy. Their support is a bit slow however. They have some other nice features, like the ability to clone a domains settings to another domain.

Other possibilities? The only other 2 registrars I recommend are eNom themselves and Domainsite. Although I don't know about their privacy products. Moniker is reputedly the safest registrar on the planet.

look i am one of onlineNIC.com and i have more than 100 domain and i am facing the same problem with them but i can't leave them they have good prices and also great support so we have to give them some more time to fix their servers

Not that its the central subject of this threat, but wouldn't one think that a pro company would be able to relocate their servers when such problems occur within a week, or else is prepared for these events by way appropiate backup facilities ? Why has their site to be blank for days and days ?
Couldn't they get a charity hosting account from one of their resellers ?

cheers
d

resellerclub ... Their pricing is similar to onlinenic ....their Whois protection service is free ...Panel is great and works fine, if they plan any maintenance, they would announce it ....

Namecheap ... a major eNom reseller with their own control panel. for less than $11 you can get the full works including flexible privacy.


The only other 2 registrars I recommend are eNom themselves and Domainsite.

thanks, ir5 and stu :)
i'll look into these.

anyone with personal experience with ipower ('$6.50 per domain') or SRS ($7.95, whats this network solutions thing with them ?).
ah, yea, and anyone who bulked away from onlineNIC and had problems ?

best
s

http://dev.yurtesen.com/content/view/16/38/


*
When you want to transfer domains out of OnlineNIC. There will be problems and support will tell you to renew your domain if you want a smooth transfer out. (check below for examples of support replies)

*
Their web pages work as slow as possible. It is sometimes not possible to login to management interface.

....

*
Transfer-out confirmation e-mails say "If you want to proceed with this transfer,you do not need to respond to this message; if you wish to cancel the transfer, please visit the following URL and follow the instructions:" However it is possible to ACCEPT/APPROVE a transfer-out using the same link.

*
When you are transferring out domains from OnlineNIC, my opinion is that they make it as painful as possible.


Examples of OnlineNIC Support Replies:

As mentioned before, the support is very responsive. However, when you ask a question you receive an answer not related to your question.

Questions about transfer failures:

*
We do not want to create the difficulties for you. Since once a domain expired, its status will refuse it being transferred. If you still insist to transfer these domains on your side, we are not sure they will be refused again or not. You could try, and inform us to follow up with them. Thanks for your kind understanding in advance!

*
These three domains expired, so they cannot be available for being transferred, as we check. Please kindly renew them soon, then try to transfer them away.

*
Per my detection, the transfer failure last time is simply because of the domain in expiration status. You may renew the domains before initiating another transfer request.

*
Once a domain expired, always the relevant URL will be down, so you could know the domain should be renewed soon. Upon the status of a domain, we would like you to renew it soon before its expiration, regardless it being transferred away or not. But if a domain expires, and you try to transfer it away, we are not sure it can be transferred smoothly or not. When it comes to your sencond question, you may know that whenever a transfer request be submitted by a new registrar, we will receive the request from the registry. While sometimes, the request from the registry will be late, and sometimes it may be postponed in our hand, thus the transfer-out notification mail will be postponed either or missed to be sent to the domain admin. This is the full explanation from our tech, upon the truth. Now they are trying to update the program to avoid such matter to come out in future. And really sorry for any inconvenience caused by this!


Please see the confirmation mail below carefully:
“If you want to proceed with this transfer, you do not need to respond to this message; if you wish to cancel the transfer, please visit the following URL and follow the instructions:”
If you agree this transfer, please do not respond to this confirmation mail.

NOTE:
The answer given above by support is false because once you click on the link given by the transfer-out confirmation e-mail, you can also 'ACCEPT/APPROVE' the transfer.

*
OnlineNIC Support Representative:
OK, please reinitiate the transfer with the gaining registrar and then send
an email to cs-eu@onlinenic.com. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it to ask our EU reps to release them manually because the domain names have expired.

Customer:
Do I have to ask to cs-eu@onlinenic.com.
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it to release them manually, everytime I want to transfer-out an expired domain?

OnlineNIC Support Representative:
Yes, it seems to be.


Last Updated ( Sunday, 17 December 2006 )

Stay well clear of ipower.

NetSol's reseller, OpenSRS comes recommended. You have to put up $250 up front which is usable. I'd assume they would be very stable, but for some reason, I've never been able to reach their website. Not that I want/need another registrar. I'm actually trying to cut down and consolidate :)

As for transferring out of Onlinenic, I've no experience, but as with most registrars, don't leave it until the last minute. Try to do it a month before your domains expire, so you have time to iron out any problems, should they occur.

Oops! sorry. The NetSol Reseller is SRSPlus.com, not OpenSRS.com. OpenSRS.com is the Tucows reseller program. I've not uses Tucows reseller program but I've seen mostly negative comments about them.

ok thanks. :)
i was beginning to get confused.

OpenSRS.com is the Tucows reseller program.
and gotcha
http://resellers.tucows.com/

who are the guys with the $250 upfront then ? SRS plus ?

btw, i just read the ipower TOS, and its a tucows reseller as well.

https://secure.ipower.com/legal_domain.html

In this Domain Name Registration Agreement ("Agreement") "Registrant", "you" and "your" refers to the registrant of each domain name registration, "we", "us" and "our" refers to Tucows.com Co., and "Services" refers to the domain name registration services provided by us as offered through IPOWER, INC., the Registration Service Provider ("Reseller") .

SRSPlus has the $250 deposit. It goes into your account so you can use it. Why are we still talking about ipower?

SRSPlus has the $250 deposit
ok.
Why are we still talking about ipower?
because we're updating my 'the good the bad and the ugly' handbook. .. :)

Well put them in the bad and ugly side of your handbook :)

will do... :)
ugly is the best slot then, right ?

cheers
d

http://dev.yurtesen.com/content/view/16/38/
Last year I transferred a few domains away from OnlineNIC as my customers requested. I didn't come across with any problem at all.

Last year I transferred a few domains away from OnlineNIC as my customers requested. I didn't come across with any problem at all.

Heh, I didnt realize that my site got this far out in the sea of Internet :)

About the transfers, it depends on if your domain is expired or not(and how much time passed after expiration).

There is a bug in OnlineNIC which actually makes transfers easy (and a lot of other things which makes them difficult). When a domain expires, OnlineNIC changes the DNS servers. But in first week of expiration or so, you can reset them back to normal and continue using the expired domain(but you dont want to wait until domain is in redemption period!). This way you can start a transfer for an expired domain and still continue it meanwhile the transfer is processing.

Otherwise OnlineNIC makes it sure that the transfer will take at least 5 days if the domain is expired, obviously this is a trick to renew the domain with them. Once you renew, you lose your renewal if you dont stick with OnlineNIC 60 more days. OnlineNIC support lies to you to keep you with them, they send you misleading e-mails etc. I dont think that I want to work with that kind of company even if it looked like working for a bunch of domains. Some small problems doesnt matter for a small number of domains but things are way more complicated when you have 1000+ domains. You dont want to spend so much time with dealing with OnlineNIC problems when you have so many domains.

Also, OnlineNIC API is not supported very well in commercial systems. OpenSRS API is supported much more. We are now using ResellOne which uses OpenSRS API (they get the software from OpenSRS) and excellent prices. It has been working reasonably good. Definetely the management interface works way faster than OnlineNIC.

Thanks,
Evren

hey yurtensen, and all...

talk about a delayed response :)
nice of you to take a look into this thread, thanks for all the info!


Is there any OnlineNIC policy or attitude that makes transferring domains away from them any harder if any domain-info was recently changed ? (similar for example to that clause at godaddy's ?).

I still have a bunch of domains with them. Been meaning to change some info now for quite a while but keep putting it off because I'm unsure if I get stuck with OnlineNIC even more by doing so.

best regards
D

Is there any OnlineNIC policy or attitude that makes transferring domains away from them any harder if any domain-info was recently changed ? (similar for example to that clause at godaddy's ?).

No, you can just change it anytime you want. By the way, you can even make expired domains work in OnlineNIC while transferring them out from them. They will tell you otherwise because they are so full of .... but you can do it. If you cant, just go and lock/unlock the expired domain and you can re-set the dns servers to show to yourself.

By the way, if you forget to transfer out an expired domain, it will go to redemption after 30-40 days so the procedure explained above doesnt make you to use free domain names :)

hi, again, yurtensen

No, you can just change it anytime you want.
Well what do you know, here's a good thing about OnlineNIC .. :)

you can even make expired domains work in OnlineNIC while transferring them out from them. They will tell you otherwise .... but you can do it. ... just lock/unlock the expired domain and reset the dns servers to show to yourself.

And while we're at it, another good thing about OnlineNIC! :)

thanks, also for that second hint.
quite useful indeed.

d

Yes, those features are very useful when you want to transfer your domains out. However they cause problems under normal operation.

For example the customer calls and says that he will pay next week, and asks cant we fix the problem. The support guy goes to onlinenic and tries to change the DNS information, voila the domain starts working again.

Then the customer forgets the payment(or there are people who wouldnt pay for things which are already working), customer realizes this when the domain goes to redemption. Then things get very complicated :)

Honestly, I would prefer that nonpaying customer's domain gets suspended and cant be activated again. Even with good intentions this 'feature' is causing troubles :)

There are some weird things about OnlineNIC even I dont understand. For example for some .com domains I can change DNS settings even when the domain is locked, for some it requires unlocking. It is really unpredictable.


Thanks,