Last Sunday, I paid for domain hosting and registration through a "company" called webhostingfactory.com for one year--around $70.

The transaction was done through PayPal and the receipt noted payment had been made to "Lori Garness." A couple days went by and my domain still wasn't registered--no record of it through a WHOIS search. Mildly concerned, I went to WHF's web site and called their toll free number--a fast busy signal. Their address was a PO Box in Leander, Texas--the business directory showed no listing for their company or Ms. Garness.

After repeated emails, I finally got a response from a "Mike B." who said there had been a technical problem and they were resending my domain registration. Well, here we are FIVE days after they took payment and there's no sign of my domain and their toll free number still rings to a fast busy signal. I contacted the firm that processes their domain registrations and got the following response today;

"You are correct, this domain does not appear to be registered anywhere. Webhostingfactory.com _is_ a customer of Bulkregister. They use our services to register domains for their clients. However, it looks like they have not as of yet registered your domain for you.

You may want to contact them about this.

Sincerely,

Bulkregister Support Staff

\"Melanie Holloway\" wrote:"

I thanked Melanie for advising me to contact WHF.com (she obviously worked as a 911 operator before accepting her current position).

In any event, webhostingfactory.com is a scam and I hope this posting helps prevent anyone else from getting ripped off.

Thanks for the notices, but i can't help feeling sorry for your 70 bucks.

Thanks for the info, this kind of information is helpful for prospective customers!

From the looks of your post, it looks like the domain registration at WHF is not an automated process, but that of a manual one. In that case, a human must do it, mistakes do happen...


Has a WHF representative contacted you since "MikeB" ?

Just fill out a fraud form on paypal.

What kind of service did you expect? They are selling a huge amount of space for dirt cheap. They probably have 100 other accounts to manually create.

This is what drives me crazy about webhosting. People want everything for nothing.

I'm not defending webhosting factory for not replying. Because that is bad customer relations. However there phone number is probably busy because of the other 99 people who signed up recently.

Checkout this link - I posted this information on the 12th June 2002

http://webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=54602

Matt

Ohh - And checkout the link for system information for webhostingfactory's "machine"

http://66.33.71.87/stats/