I am not a happy bunny.

I have (had?) a domain at registerfly which was due to expire on 31st Jan. I selected (and paid) to renew this domain on 28th Jan. At this point Registerfly tell me that they are consolidating their back end providers, so some domains (such as mine) are being transferred instead of renewed. 1st of February rolls round and my domain stops resolving to my server, and is instead on a holding page.

I think that I can see what has happened here. The transfer has not been quick enough and the domain has expired. I am slightly annoyed at this. If there was not enough time to transfer the domain from one back end provider to another, Registerfly should have renewed it with them, and then transferred it. It is not my concern how they wish to organise their back end operations. I paid for a renewal (not a transfer) more than 48 hours before it was due to expire.

So, I duly get onto Registerfly support and ask them to sort this out immediately (as the domain is not resolving). I get beck the following response after almost 24 hours (and then they close the ticket - I can't see anyway to reopen it):

The domain XXXXXXX is expired and locked by Enom(your registrar), so please contact them at www.enom.com to renew the domain.


THATS IT. I don't have an enom account. Why should I have to contact enom? I paid Registerfly to renew it (on time) and they failed to do so.

What do I do now?

You may want to read about what you can and can't do in your situation here:

http://www.registerflies.com

We had exactly this same problem when we tried to renew an active site's domain name for 3 weeks, with all our support tickets ignored.

After the name had actually expired and amid a flurry of emails from RF urging us to renew the name immediately (at a higher price), we finally got an email saying the name had been transferred to Registerfly.com (apparently from Enom which Registerfly are/were a reseller for) and seemingly renewed at the same time....WTF?

We are totally freaked out by Registerfly's behavior and the myriad of other problems we've had, not just now but over the last few years, and we have already begun moving all our domains to another registrar as a matter of urgency.

Our experience and strong recommendation is to do the same without delay.